CAREER: Mapping the brain's potential to read multiple words simultaneously

This project aims to transform our understanding of how the human brain reads, informing new strategies to improve literacy for all people and offering useful insights for millions of individuals living with dyslexia, stroke, or visual impairments. Learning to read builds new connections between the parts of the brain that process visual information and those that process language. This project aims to map out those connections and fill an important gap in our understanding of how reading-related brain areas process combinations of words, not just one word at a time. The project also seeks to bridge fundamental brain research and educational innovations that strengthen the national workforce. Additionally, a better understanding of how the brain extracts meaning from strings of letters could have implications for artificial intelligence (AI) systems that do the same. The primary research activities involve precise vision and reading tests combined with brain imaging experiments, while providing hands-on computational training to undergraduate students who plan to enter the STEM workforce. Reaching beyond the laboratory, the investigators plan to share the excitement of neuroscience by hosting an annual Visual Illusion Fair for local schoolchildren and professional development workshops for their teachers. Grounded in theories of both vision and language processing, this project maps the spatial boundaries of word recognition and evaluates how the constraints imposed by peripheral vision might be alleviated when words appear in meaningful contexts. The main hypotheses are that skilled adult readers can recognize multiple words at once, as opposed to only one word at a time, and that this process is facilitated by linguistic context. The project uses neuroimaging and novel computational analyses to probe the neural basis of multiple word recognition, aiming to address significant gaps in previous research by analyzing patterns of brain activity during tasks that are more applicable to natural reading. The goals are to make new discoveries about how words are recognized, determine a more complete map of the brain networks that support reading, and identify novel ways to measure each individual’s processing capacity and strategies to maximize it. 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.