Relatori: Prof. Davide Crepaldi, Dr. Jon W. Carr
Data: 17 LUGLIO 2024 dalle 11:00 alle 17:00
Luogo: Laboratorio Sperimentale, LILEC, via Cartoleria, 5 - Evento in presenza e online
Scanning a passage of text requires a fine coordination between the oculomotor system and the language processing machinery in the brain. The seminar will provide a broad overview of this fine coordination, with a particular focus on the dynamics of eye movements during reading (e.g., fixations and saccades) and the metrics that one can extract from these dynamics (e.g., first fixation, gaze duration, skipping). We’ll discuss how these different metrics can be used to gauge the structure and behaviour of the reading system, using some practical examples. If we’ll have time, a broad overview of some current models of eye movements during reading, and how they can inform linguistic and psychological theorizing, will also be provided.
A wide range of software is currently available for running eye-tracking experiments and performing analyses of reading data. However, much of this software is proprietary and closed-source, making it difficult to build custom experiments, automate analysis pipelines, and scrutinize the software vendors’ assumptions. In this talk, I will demonstrate how Python can be used to collect and analyze eye-tracking data in a fully open way. The talk will introduce key concepts, such as interest areas and fixation sequences, and I will cover the practical aspects of creating stimuli, handling data files, cleaning raw fixation data, and calculating common reading measures. I will demonstrate these things using an open-source Python package that I created called Eyekit (https://jwcarr.github.io/eyekit/). After the talk, attendees will be able to download some Python code to try things out for themselves.
Davide Crepaldi is neuropsychologist turned experimental psychologist turned cognitive neuroscientist — always being a computational modeller wannabe in the process. He’s been leading a research group at SISSA, Trieste, for about 10 years, and is now in the process of moving to the University of Pavia. He’s interested in language and reading, and how their processing might be grounded into language-agnostic computational and neural machinery.
Jon W. Carr is currently a postdoc at Royal Holloway, University of London. Broadly, he’s interested in the interaction between human behavior and cultural phenomena, with a particular emphasis on how language shapes – and is shaped by – cognition. He’s been exploring these issues with computational models (typically Bayesian) and behavioral experiments (typically artificial language learning).
