Developing a unified framework of reading and attention through attentional-oculomotor exercise and cognitive neuroscience examinations of frontal-eye-field structure and function
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".