Associate Professor, Psychology University of Pittsburgh Phone: (412) 624-7457 Fax: (412) 624-9149 Email: reichle@pitt.edu Individual Website: http://www.pitt.edu/~reichle/

Ph.D., University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Research Interests

My main research interest is reading; more specifically, I would like to understand how language, attention, and vision guide eye movements during normal reading. Although our eyes seem to move smoothly and continuously across the page, this subjective experience is misleading; instead of moving smoothly and continuously, the eyes make rapid (20-25 ms) movements, called saccades, which move the eyes forward 6-8 character spaces (on average). Between saccades, the eyes remain stationary for brief periods of time, called fixations, which typically last 200-250 ms (although some fixations are shorter than 100 ms, and some are longer than 400 ms). Because visual information is only extracted from the printed page during fixations, reading is similar to a slide show in which each "slide" (word) is displayed for approximately a quarter of a second.

The fact that visual information must be extracted from the printed page suggests that the process of identifying words determines when and where the eyes move during reading. One problem with this simple explanation is that, while it takes 100-300 ms to identify a word, it only takes approximately 180 ms to initiate a saccade. Thus, if it takes more time to identify a word than it does to initiate a saccade, how can the identification of one word be the signal to start moving the eyes to the next? This paradox, in conjunction with evidence that both visual (e.g., retinal acuity) and oculomotor (e.g., saccadic error) factors partially determine where the eyes move, has lead to claims that eye guidance is not tightly linked to language processing in normal reading (McConkie, Kerr, Reddix, & Zola, 1988; O'Regan, 1990, 1992; O'Regan & Levy-Schoen, 1987; Reilly & O'Regan, 1998; Suppes, 1990, 1994; Vitu, O'Regan, Inhoff, & Topolski, 1995). Such claims are problematic because eye movements (which can be measured using eye-tracking devices) have been widely used to make inferences about language processing during reading (for a review, see Rayner, 1998).

The computer simulation model (E-Z Reader) that was developed by my colleagues and I (Reichle, Pollatsek, Fisher, & Rayner, 1998; Reichle & Rayner, 2001; Reichle, Rayner, & Pollatsek, 1999) demonstrates how one component of language processing (an early stage of word identification) can be the “engine” driving eye movements during normal reading. The model makes quantitative predictions about both fixation durations (with ms temporal resolution) and locations (with character-space spatial resolution), and successfully accounts for a large number of eye-movement phenomena. The model is also currently being used as an analytical tool to examine the time course of neural activity (as measured using ERPs) during visual word identification, and to evaluate various theoretical assumptions about lexical ambiguity resolution and the representation of morphemically complex words.

Recent Publications

• Reichle ED, Laurent PA: Using reinforcement learning to understand the emergence of "intelligent" eye-movement behavior in reading. Psychol Rev 113: 390-408, 2006.
• Reichle ED, Rayner K: Cognitive processing and models of reading. In G. K. Hung & K. J. Ciuffreda (Ed.), Models of the Visual System: 565-604, 2004.
• Reichle ED, Rayner K, Pollatsek A: The E-Z reader model of eye-movement control in reading: Comparisons to other models. Behav Brain Sci 26: 445-526, 2003.
• Reichle ED, Rayner K, Pollatsek A: Eye movement control in reading: Accounting for initial fixation locations and refixations within the E-Z Reader model. Vision Res 39: 4403-4411, 1999.
• Reichle ED, Pollatsek A, Fisher DL, Rayner K: Toward a model of eye movement control in reading. Psychol Rev 105: 125-157, 1998.