Co-registration of eye movements and neuroimaging for studying contextual predictions in natural reading

Sixteen years ago, Sereno and Rayner (2003. Measuring word recognition in reading: eye movements and event-related potentials. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(11), 489–493) illustrated how “by means of review and comparison” eye movement (EM) and event-related potential (ERP) studies may advance our understanding of visual word recognition. Attempts to simultaneously record EMs and ERPs soon followed. Recently, this co-registration approach has also been transferred to fMRI and oscillatory EEG. With experimental settings close to natural reading, co-registration enables us to directly integrate insights from EM and neuroimaging studies. This should extend current experimental paradigms by moving the field towards studying sentence-level processing including effects of context and parafoveal preview. This article will introduce the basic principles and applications of co-registration and selectively review how this approach may shed light on one of the most controversially discussed issues in reading research, contextual predictions in online language processing.