Looking inside and beyond eye fixations in reading

Co-registration of neural and behavioral measures is key in developing a holistic understanding of reading. However, researchers must study not only neural effects inside fixations, early enough to initiate saccade decisions, but also later effects that are linguistically driven. Furthermore, researchers must not only use co-registration to allow for naturalistic reading but also to look beyond individual fixations to examine the coupling between temporally extended neural language processing and saccade decisions. Such an approach has revealed that saccade decisions are triggered at an intermediate point of lexical processing, followed by complete recognition and integration of a word into its context. This account can resolve the apparent paradox that the eyes can move through text faster than the brain understands it.