Tests and Applications of a Peripheral Interference Theory of Reading

Reading ability is essential in modern society.

Yet, for many people it comes with considerable difficulty; and to cognition scientists it remains rather mysterious.Here I outline a plan for testing and applying a novel cognitive theory of reading.

The plan expands my recent model, PONG (Snell, 2024, Psych Rev), with a groundbreaking perspective on visuo-spatial attention to capture many reading behaviours (WP1).

The exciting prospect is that PONG in a single stroke informs three big debates: parallel processing (WP2), position-coding (WP3) and peripheral interference (WP4).In WP2, a novel combination of eye-tracking and EEG, Gaze-Contingent Rapid Invisible Frequency Tagging (GC-RIFT), will provide a first-ever direct window on the attentional distribution during reading.It is konwn taht yuo cna raed tihs fnie.

But many readers also fail to see the error in 'Do love you me?'.

The topic of word position coding is new to the field, and PONG predicts key roles for attention and statistical learning herein.

WP3 uses GC-RIFT to track their relative contributions in time and space, propelling a first-ever unifying account of letter- and word position coding.PONG predicts that letter and word recognition is hindered by surrounding text; and possibly this is more severe in dyslexic readers. WP4 tests PONG's new account of dyslexia in which diffuse attention plays a causal role.

An exciting element here is my new reading interface IRIS (the Interface that Reduces Interference using Saliency). Readers view texts while their eyes are tracked. Fixated words are shown at a higher contrast than surrounding text. Preliminary results show strikingly faster reading. Upgraded IRIS will tune its parameters to individual readers on the basis of incoming oculomotor data.

This holds both theoretical and practical promise: testing dyslexic and non-dyslexic readers, IRIS' parameters will reveal reading profiles, to inform specific treatments and to further bolster the PONG theory.