Equipment: Acquisition of an EEG/eye tracking co-registration system to identify neurocognitive mechanisms of reading

This Major Research Instrument award supports the acquisition of electroencephalography (EEG) and eye tracking equipment to be used as a single neurocognitive “co-registration” instrument located at San Diego State University (SDSU). Co-registration permits the simultaneous measurement of brain activity recorded from the scalp and eye movements made during reading (and other visual tasks) with millisecond temporal resolution. The ability to co-register eye and brain measures recorded simultaneously is a relatively recent innovation that enhances understanding of the link between cognitive processes indexed by both eye behaviors and neural activity. Co-registration of EEG and eye-tracking is methodologically and conceptually challenging, and utilization of this equipment by SDSU researchers helps advance this technology by applying different paradigms (e.g., reading, visual search) and including diverse populations (e.g., deaf readers; aphasic patients). In addition, the research helps develop best practices for co-registration studies and promotes the use of this new technology in other labs. Through ERP Boot Camps led by SDSU faculty, SDSU students as well as students and faculty from other institutions whave the opportunity to learn the basics of how to use this equipment. The research projects conducted using this instrument also broaden the participation of under-represented groups in science and engineering by including deaf and hard-of-hearing students in the research and training. In addition, SDSU is a Hispanic-Serving Institution, and many of the students trained in this new technology are LatinX, ChicanX, or Hispanic. Skilled reading is deceptively complex – it involves an overlapping series of incredibly intricate, precisely timed, neural processes that unfold at a rapid rate. Understanding these processes advance our knowledge of the underlying mechanisms that are critical to the ultimate goal of skilled reading comprehension. A key question addressed with the co-registration system is how parafoveal word processing in deaf readers is impacted by the enhanced attention to the visual periphery that has been documented for deaf adults. The co-registration system enables the use of natural sentence reading paradigms to identify how changes in the distribution of visual spatial attention in deaf readers effects the extraction of semantic and syntactic information from the parafovea and whether reading comprehension ability modulates these effects. The results of this research provide a translational foundation for pedagogical and remediation approaches to improve reading abilities in both deaf and hearing individuals. Other research projects include the investigation of how temporal delays in language processing (e.g., lexical access) impact sentence comprehension impairments in individuals with aphasia and investigations of covert and overt attentional mechanisms that impact how emotional stimuli drive distraction in real world contexts for people with psychopathology (e.g., anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.