Welcome to the Wesleyan Eye Movement and Reading Lab!

We are part of the Psychology Department and Neuroscience & Behavior Program at Wesleyan University. We are also affiliated with Wesleyan’s College of Education Studies and College of Integrative Sciences.

Our lab studies the processes involved in the complex skill of reading. The majority of our research is devoted to examining factors that affect word recognition during silent reading in adults. We are particularly interested in uncovering how the meanings of words are represented in the mental lexicon and how experiences with word learning in childhood impact lexicon organization into adulthood.

Our primary method for investigating word recognition is to measure readers’ eye movements through eye tracking. Our lab is equipped with an Eyelink 1000 eye tracker (SR Research, Ltd), which records eye position every millisecond while participants read sentences on a computer screen.