Individual differences in reading fluency in Schizophrenia: Evidence from eye movements and fixation-related potentials

Readers with Schizophrenia (Sz) show decreased reading fluency, which negatively impacts both social and occupational outcomes. This talk will present an ongoing line of work that integrates eye tracking, EEG, and computational modeling, to investigate individual differences in reading fluency in readers with and without Schizophrenia. Our findings suggest that both higher-level (e.g., lexical) and lower-level (e.g., oculomotor and visual) processes contribute to slower reading fluency in readers with Schizophrenia. Compared to a control group, readers with Sz show reduced fixation-P1 amplitudes, longer fixation durations, fewer skipped words, and large increases in refixation rates (i.e., the probability of fixating on a word more than once). Also, as evidence that readers with Sz are making more refixations to compensate for reductions in parafoveal processing, their refixations landed closer to the center of the word (i.e., the optimal viewing location) compared to the control group. Building on these findings, simulations using the E-Z Reader model of eye movement control during reading also indicated that reduced reading fluency in Schizophrenia reflects changes to both high- and low-level processing. This talk will discuss how these findings can provide empirical constraints for the development of eye movement control models that better account for individual differences during reading.