Alexander White
Barnard College, NY·Neuroscience·Early-career
When we read, do we take in one word at a time, or can the brain recognize several words at once? Learning to read builds new links between the brain's visual areas and its language areas.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
- Topics
reading
word recognition
peripheral vision
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2031
What they work on
- Test whether skilled adult readers can recognize multiple words at once rather than one at a time, using precise vision and reading tests.
- Map the spatial limits of word recognition in peripheral (off-center) vision and test whether meaningful linguistic context relaxes these limits.
- Use brain imaging and new computational analyses of brain activity patterns, during tasks resembling natural reading, to map the networks that support multiple word recognition.
- Develop ways to measure each individual's word-processing capacity and identify strategies that may maximize it.
More about the research
Most experiments, however, show readers single isolated words, unlike natural reading. Understanding how the brain handles combinations of words could inform literacy teaching, help people with dyslexia, stroke or visual impairments, and even shed light on artificial intelligence (AI) systems that extract meaning from text.
Why it matters
A clearer map of how the brain recognizes several words at once could inform strategies to improve literacy. It could also offer insights for people living with dyslexia, stroke or visual impairments, provide new ways to measure an individual's reading capacity, and inform artificial intelligence systems that read text.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Michael Brown
Villanova University, PA·Psychology·Early-career
Identify which sound information listeners use to tell spoken words apart by recording brain responses in the first few hundred milliseconds after hearing speech.
C Arrington
Georgia State University, GA·Neuroscience
Test whether inhibiting the left dorsal stream with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) slows sound processing and impairs learning and retention of similar-sounding made-up words in typical readers aged 16 to 21.
Eszter Ronai
Northwestern University, IL·Psychology
Identify the real-time processing signals of focus, the marking of new or emphasized information, in languages with fixed versus flexible word order, using eye-gaze data and statistical modeling.
The school
Barnard College: 1 labs on PI Pages, $6M a year on research.
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