Reading for understanding: Neurocognitive studies of science text comprehension. The 4th Association for Reading and Writing in Asia conference (ARWA 2020). Chinese University of Hong Kong; Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 24-25 September 2020.

Abstract:

How do students understand scientific concepts by constructing an underlying mental model through text comprehension? In a large comparative study (the ‘Reading Brain’ project), we have examined how readers of different age, language background, and reading ability comprehend expository scientific texts, and the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying successful comprehension. In particular, we are interested in the neurocognitive bases of individual reader’s cognitive differences and textual knowledge structure, and how the text and reader characteristics interact during the rapid online process to produce successful understanding of science concepts. Our studies use self paced naturalistic reading in the MRI, relying on multimodal imaging data to reveal processes and mechanisms underlying the integration of text information at different time scales during reading. We have also explored data-intensive machine-learning methods to analyze the complex multimodal data including functional and structural MRI and eye-tracking data. Our findings provide insights into neuroplasticity (e.g., how rapid brain changes occur as a function of mental model construction), individual differences (e.g., how the reader’s cognitive ability interacts with text properties), and knowledge representation (e.g., how neurocognitive patterns reflect acquired scientific knowledge and its sustained representation). Our results also have significant implications for education in a population that is increasingly dependent on electronic devices as the medium of reading.