Measuring Processing Strategies: Perspectives for Eye Tracking and fMRI in Multimethod Designs

• In Event: Investigating Strategies and Strategy Use: Where Do We Go From Here?

Abstract

Up to now, empirical research on students’ processing strategies in higher education has mainly focused on using self-report measures at a more general level (at the course level or at the level of several different courses) to capture students’ general disposition towards processing strategies (Fryer, 2017; Vermunt & Donche, 2017). However, researchers in the field agree on the variability of processing strategies over learning tasks, but most empirical research is conducted at a more general level, thus ignoring this variability at the task level. More recently, with the advent of new psychophysiological measures, such as eye-tracking and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), there is a renewed interest in examining the task-specific processing strategies during a learning task. This poster will give an overview on how eye tracking and fMRI can be used in order to examine students’ processing strategies in relation to learning from verbal material (i.e., words, paragraphs and texts).
Eye movements, and more specifically second pass fixation durations, reflect partly what students report on their processing strategies. Second pass fixation durations refer to the duration of all regressions back to a target region (e.g., a sentence) after the first pass reading time has been terminated and are an indication of deeper processing. Deeper cognitive processing, as referred to in eye movement research (Holmqvist & Andersson, 2017), is not the same as deep processing, as defined by theoretical models on students’ processing strategies (Dinsmore, 2017; Vermunt & Donche, 2017). Eye movement research showed that longer second pass fixation durations can also be related to surface processing strategies and, thus, do not always reflect the deep processing strategies as referred to in theoretical models on processing strategies (Catrysse et al., 2016). Other research provided evidence that longer second pass fixation durations do not solely reflect deep processing strategies but are an indication of the multiple use of processing strategies, namely, combining both surface and deep processing strategies (Catrysse, Gijbels, Donche, et al., 2018), and can be a reflection of deeper processing strategies only in combination with a high topic interest for key sentences (Catrysse, Gijbels, & Donche, 2018).
Neuroscientific research can provide more insight on whether differences between deep and surface processing strategies are qualitative (i.e., activations in different brain regions) or quantitative (i.e., overlapping brain regions, but differences in the level of activation) in nature (Galli, 2014). More specifically, it has the opportunity to indicate whether deep and surface processing strategies are overlapping constructs or not. Processing strategies have mostly been examined using very basic learning tasks at the word level. Subjects receive deep level and surface level learning tasks in order to evaluate words when they are being scanned. The review of Galli (2014) indicated that it is hard to precisely separate between deep and surface encoding tasks. Galli (2014) suggested that this is one of the main reasons why neuroscientific research is offering mixed evidence on whether the distinction between deep and surface processing strategies is qualitative or quantitative in nature.

Authors

• Leen Catrysse, University of Antwerp

• David Gijbels, University of Antwerp

• Vincent Donche, University of Antwerp