NUS Computing PhD Candidate’s Paper on How We Read Published in Nature Human Behaviour

A paper by Bai Yunpeng, a PhD candidate at NUS Computing, has been published in Nature Human Behaviour, one of the leading journals in the behavioural and cognitive sciences.

“Hierarchical resource rationality explains human reading behaviour” addresses a long-standing gap in reading research. Existing theories have explained either how the eyes move during reading or how comprehension is built, but not the link between the two. Bai Yunpeng, working with Associate Professor Antti Oulasvirta of Aalto University and Professor Zhao Shengdong of City University of Hong Kong, proposes that both are governed by a single principle: the brain selects eye movements to maximise expected understanding while minimising cognitive and time costs.

This principle operates across three nested timescales. Fixation decisions support word recognition. Sentence-level processing guides when the eyes skip ahead or move back to reread. Text-level comprehension goals shape memory and rereading over longer stretches of text. The team built this framework into a computational model, which reproduced a wide range of established findings in reading research, from effects at the level of individual words to outcomes as broad as overall comprehension.

The model offers a general account of how the brain coordinates perception, memory and action under limited resources, a principle that extends beyond reading. Potential applications include tools that support people with reading difficulties, educational technology that adapts to individual learners, and embodied AI systems designed to interpret visual information the way humans do.

The team plans to extend the model beyond text to more visual forms of reading, integrate it with embodied AI systems, and build simulators to support future studies of reading behaviour.