Closing of the UCSD Rayner Eyetracking Lab

The Rayner Eyetracking Lab at UCSD is now closed, but the former members are still active! As of August, 2016 you can find them at the following institutions:

And if you are interested in the Rayner Eyetracking Lab’s Data Repository please go to the Keith Rayner Eye Movements in Reading Data Collection

Congratulations Matt Abbott!

On January 20, 2016 Matt Abbott successfully defended his dissertation “The interaction of language processing and eye movement control during reading.” Matt is now a Data Scientist at Textio in Seattle, WA. Good luck, Matt we will miss you!!

Keith Rayner Eye Movements in Reading Data Collection

We’ve been working hard over the past few months with the UCSD Library Data Curation team to put together an open data collection that reflects the contributions of the UCSD Rayner Lab to reading research. The collection itself can be found here: http://library.ucsd.edu/dc/collection/bb95920960. From the landing page:

This collection consists of eye movement data from published studies conducted in Keith Rayner’s Eyetracking Lab in the Department of Psychology at UCSD. The collection does not represent one project, but rather a snapshot of the work produced by Rayner’s highly productive lab from his arrival at UCSD in 2008 until he passed away in 2015. During this time, Rayner published more than 130 papers with collaborators at UCSD and around the world. Included in this collection are data and materials from 29 studies that were conducted in-house, and so the collection reflects the subset of work carried out primarily by Rayner’s graduate students, post-docs, and research assistants at UCSD.

The collection is roughly half complete right now — data from the second wave of studies will be available soon.

New paper in JML

Check out Matt’s recent paper in JML on frequency and plausibility effects on eye movements, which features an introduction to hypothesis testing with Bayes factors:

Abbott, M. J., & Staub, A. (2015). The effect of plausibility on eye movements in reading: Testing EZ Reader’s null predictions. Journal of Memory and Language, 85, 76-87.

For more detail on Bayes factor, here are Matt’s slides from a talk given at the UCSD Computational Psycholinguistics Lab: Talk slides.

RaynerLab is Busy

The RaynerLab continues to buzz with activity, even as the long San Diego summer approaches! Check out some of what our graduate students and post-docs have been doing by reading some of our papers! Pasted below is a sample of recent publications (for more see Publications). Come back soon for an update regarding upcoming conference appearances, including ECEM!

Abbott, M. J., Angele, B., Ahn, Y. D., & Rayner, K. (2015). Skipping syntactically illegal “the”-previews: The role of predictability. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000142

Bélanger, N.N. & Rayner, K. (2015). What Eye Movements Reveal about Deaf Readers. Current Directions in Psychological Science24, 220-226. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963721414567527

Higgins, E., & Rayner, K. (2015). Transsaccadic processing: stability, integration, and the potential role of remapping. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics77, 3-27. http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13414-014-0751-y

Leinenger, M., & Rayner K. (in press) Eye movements and visual attention during reading. In J. Fawcett, E. F. Risko, & A. Kingstone (Eds.) The Handbook of Attention. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

von der Malsburg, T., & Angele, B. (2015). False positive rates in
standard analyses of eye movements in reading. Published on ArXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.06896

Schotter, E.R., Lee, M., Reiderman, M., & Rayner, K. (2015). The effect of contextual constraint on parafoveal processing in reading. Journal of Memory and Language83, 118-139. http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1016/j.jml.2015.04.005

Keith Rayner (1943-2015)

With deep sadness, we announce the passing of Distinguished Professor Keith Rayner, Atkinson Family Chair of Psychology at UC San Diego. Keith was the world’s leading expert in the study of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the ability to read in children and adults. Keith left a deep mark on his colleagues in his discipline, as well as the dozens of students and scholars he has mentored throughout the world across his forty-year career.

Keith’s full obituary is located here.

A memorial website can be found here.

Psychonomics 2014

Come see some of the ongoing work in our lab at the Psychonomic Society Annual Meeting in Long Beach, CA! Click the links to download our posters.

Abbott, Angele, Ahn, & Rayner (Friday Noon-1:30, Poster 2134). Skipping Syntactically Illegal “The” Previews—The Role of Predictability.

Plummer, Abbott, & Rayner (Friday Noon-1:30, Poster 2132). Predicting Individual Differences in the Perceptual Span and Eye Movement Behavior During Reading.

Bélanger, Schotter, & Rayner (Saturday Noon-1:30, Poster 4180). Young Deaf Readers’ Word Processing Efficiency.

Schotter (Saturday 2:10-2:25, “Reading” Spoken Session). Toward a New Theory of Reading: Independent and Joint Effects of Context, Parafoveal Preview, and Foveal Information