Developing a unified framework of reading and attention through attentional-oculomotor exercise and cognitive neuroscience examinations of frontal-eye-field structure and function

Reading is a cognitive skill that involves integrating multiple processes. One of these processes is attention, but the theoretical models of reading and attention are typically considered separately. Given the role of attention in successful reading, and research that suggests attention is affected in dyslexia, this thesis proposes a unified framework of reading + attention to better understand how these cognitive processes work together, with a focus on the attentional process of oculomotor activity. \nExperiment 1 developed a novel approach to isolate orthographic lexical decision processing and a gaming-style health bar task to manipulate attentional-oculomotor exercise. Through manipulation of stimulus location, Experiment 1 suggested peripheral attentional-oculomotor exercise was more beneficial to reading performance than central attentional-oculomotor exercise, supporting recent theories of oculomotor activity in reading. Experiments 2 and 3 further developed this paradigm, and observed benefits of both peripheral and central attentional-oculomotor exercise on reading suggesting fine-grained oculomotor processes may also play a role in the reading + attention relationship. All three of these studies observed word frequency of lexical targets was associated with improved performance in the lexical decision task while bigram frequency of sublexical foils was associated with worse performance, which will be a useful measure for future studies that are attempting to isolate these processes.\nExperiment 4 used data from a hybrid reading and attention fMRI experiment to localize the interaction between reading and attention in the frontal-eye-field – a region involved in oculomotor activity. An interaction in fMRI activation was observed in the frontal-eye-field, supporting theories of the region’s involvement in reading and attention. The frontal-eye-field region of interest identified in Experiment 4 was used in Experiment 5 to identify the connectivity profile of the frontal-eye-field with other reading + attention regions. Connections with the basal ganglia, cerebellum, and superior parietal lobule were highlighted, which are implicated across a number of components in the reading and attention networks. \nUsing these findings as a framework, a combined model of reading + attention was proposed to serve as a foundation for future research on reading + attention. The findings will have implications in both the research fields of reading and attention, as well as applications in the development of reading interventions for dyslexia, which can benefit from attentional-oculomotor exercise.

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