Tracking Readers' Eye Movements Can Help Computers Learn

For our eyes, reading is hardly a smooth ride. They stutter across the page, lingering over words that surprise or confuse, hopping over those that seem obvious in context (you can blame that for your typos), pupils widening when a word sparks a potent emotion. All this commotion is barely noticeable, occurring in milliseconds. But for psychologists who study how our minds process language, our unsteady eyes are a window into the black box of our brains. Nora Hollenstein, a graduate student at ETH Zurich, thinks our reader's gaze could be useful for another task: helping computers learn to read. Researchers are constantly looking for ways to make artificial neural networks more brainlike, but brain waves are noisy and poorly understood.