

Use skimming to overview your textbook chapters or to review for a test. But when you skim, you may miss important points or overlook the finer shadings of meaning, for which rapid reading or perhaps even study reading may be necessary. It is very useful as a preview to a more detailed reading or when reviewing a selection heavy in content. However, it is not always the most appropriate way to read. Skimming can save you hours of laborious reading. Use scanning in research to find particular facts, to study fact-heavy topics, and to answer questions requiring factual support. Use skimming in previewing (reading before you read), reviewing (reading after you read), determining the main idea from a long selection you don't wish to read, or when trying to find source material for a research paper. Skimming is like snorkeling, and scanning is more like pearl diving. While skimming tells you what general information is within a section, scanning helps you locate a particular fact. Scanning is reading rapidly in order to find specific facts. Skimming is reading rapidly in order to get a general overview of the material. Our results provide converging evidence that after a sentence is read, its syntactic structure is processed, followed byĪ semantic integration of sentence meaning.Skimming and scanning are reading techniques that use rapid eye movement and keywords to move quickly through text for slightly different purposes.

Neural activity during the post-sentence time period. We compare the ability of models that separate syntax, semantics, and integration to explain We additionally explore post-sentence wrap-up activity that carries information about syntax and integrated semantics of the sentence being read. We examine how sentence processing differs between active and passive sentences by showing the information flow over time during the reading of each type of sentence. We also explored a non-machine learning technique, representational similarity analysis (RSA) that is quite popular for analyzing neuroimaging data, and show that by combining data across subjects we can again greatly improve performance. We achieve near-perfect classification accuracy on a wide range of decoding tasks from neural activity. Furthermore we show that while test set signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is critical for classifier performance, training set SNR has limited impact on performance. Specifically, we demonstrate that by combining data from multiple human subjectsĪs additional features, classifier performance is significantly improved, even without additional data samples. Recommendations on the optimal application of machine learning to MEG data. Through exploration of the pilot data set, we are able to make several concrete The confirmation set allowed for confirmation of these hypotheses via replication. We collected data from subjects reading active and passive voice sentences in two experiments: a pilot and a confirmation set The pilot set constituted a testbed for optimizing the application of machine learning to MEG data, and was used forĮxploratory analysis to generate data-driven hypotheses. With machine learning, we can decode sentence attributes from the neural activity and gain insight into the inner computations of the brain during sentence comprehension. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG) we can measure the activity of many neurons at a rate of 1kHz while humans read sentences. “The woman helped the man.” and “The man was helped by the woman.” map to the same proposition? High temporal resolution neuroimaging,Ĭoupled with machine learning can potentially provide answers. Specifically, how can sentences that are structured differently, e.g.

Language comprehension is a crucial human ability, but many questions remain unanswered about the processing of sentences.
