Erik Reichle

​I'm currently a Professor and Head of the Department of Psychology at Macquarie University.  My research uses computational modeling, eye-movement experiments, and other methods (e.g., ERP) to understand the perceptual, cognitive, and motor processes involved in reading.  I've authored more than 60 articles on these topics in international journals, including Brain and Behavioral Sciences, Psychological Review, and Psychological Science.  I've also received fellowships from the Hanse Institute of Advanced Studies (Germany), the Leverhulme Trust (United Kingdom), and the National 1,000 Talents Award (China).  My forthcoming book, entitled Computational Models of Reading: A Handbook, provides a comprehensive review of models that are used to understand the mental processes involved in reading.  And when I'm not working, I spend my time traveling the world with my partner and scientific collaborator, Dr. Lili Yu.

My research attempts to answer the question: What determines when and where you move your eyes as you are reading sentences like this one?  Although this question may seem esoteric, answering it required an understanding of how the perceptual, cognitive, and motor processes that support reading interact to guide the eyes through text.  At a minimum, this includes some understanding of the visual processes that encode words from the printed page, the cognitive processes that retrieve word meanings from memory so that this information can be used to construct a representation of the text, and the motor procedures involved in programming and executing eye movements.  My efforts to understand how this happens have largely focused on the development of a computer model, E-Z Reader, that describes these mental processes and that simulates readers’ eye movements (Reichle, Pollatsek, Fisher, & Rayner, 1998; for a review, see Reichle, 2011).  I am currently developing a more comprehensive model of reading—one that describes the mental processes involved in reading in significantly more detail.  This model, Über-Reader, will be described in my forthcoming book, Computational Models of Reading: A Handbook, which will be published by Oxford University Press.

In the past, I've taught cognitive psychology, reseach methods, and statistics (at the undergraduate level), and a graduate-level seminar/practicum entitled "Computational Modeling in Psychology."  I also routinely supervise Honors students who work on a variety of topics related to either cognitive psychology (espcially attention, memory, and reading) OR that use computer modeling to examine issues across other areas of psychology (e.g., the phenomenon of mnemic neglect in the study of personality).  That being said, I am perticularly interested in supervising students who want to use computer modeling to examine phenomena across different areas of psychology, including both social and clinical psychology.  

I’m currently the Head of the Psychology Department.  For that reason, I haven’t had as much time in recent years to engage in other types of community engagement.  I have, however, been on the editorial boards of a number of journals, including Psychological Review and Visual Cognition, and I continue to review on an ad hoc basis for other journals.  I am also interested in and deeply committed to issues of equity and inclusivity.