School of Kinesiology professor Thomas Stoffregen, PhD, published an article titled, “Structure of variability in scanning movement predicts braille reading performance in children,” in Scientific Reports on March 30, 2021. Co-authors were Tetsushi Nonaka, from the Graduate School of Human Development and Environment at Kobe University, Japan, and Kiyohide Ito, from the School of Systems Information Science, Future University Hakodate, Japan.

The study looked at children learning to read braille. Over a period of 12 months, researchers recorded the position and orientation of the reading fingers of eight congenitally or early blind children. To a casual observer, it may appear that hand movements of braille readers are smooth and continuous. Stoffregen and his colleagues conducted the first test to determine whether these movements contained subtle variations that could contribute to success in braille reading. Using detrended fluctuation analysis, the researchers identified consistent patterns of variability in finger movement that were related to reading performance—to how well children understood the text. Their results add to the growing body of evidence that long-range temporal correlations in exploratory behavior can predict perceptual performance, and extend these effects to the domain of finger movements in braille reading.

Stoffregen directs the Affordance Perception-Action Laboratory (APAL).