A new article used eye-tracking technology to record eye movements of readers and concluded that people with dyslexia have a profoundly different and much more difficult way of sampling visual information than normal readers.

«People have known that individuals with dyslexia have slower reading rates for a long time,» says the paper’s co-author Aaron Johnson, an associate professor and chair of the Department of Psychology.

«Previous studies have also looked at eye movement in adult dyslexics. But this paper quite nicely brings these together and uses behavioural measures to give us a full representation of what differences do occur.»

The eyes have it

Dyslexia researchers use several metrics to measure eye movements. These include fixations (the duration of a stop), saccades (lengths of a jump) and counting the number of times a reader’s eyes express a jump. Traditionally, dyslexia researchers would use a single sentence to measure these movements. Johnson and his co-authors used instead standardized identical texts several sentences long that were read by 35 undergraduate students diagnosed with dyslexia and 38 others in a control group.

The researchers wanted to address a core question in the field: are reading difficulties the result of a cognitive or neurological origin or of the eye movements that guide the uptake of information while reading?

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Materials provided by Concordia University. Original written by Patrick Lejtenyi. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.