The role of social cognition in the development of reading comprehension abilities: Evidence from behavioral, eye-tracking, and neuroimaging methods.

Reading comprehension skills are usually acquired in the context of narratives, whose understanding requires social cognitive abilities such as perspective taking. This project combines insights from developmental cognitive neuroscience and research on reading comprehension to determine the cognitive and neural bases of the development of reader characteristics that contribute to text comprehension in childhood and adolescence. The role of the development of social cognition will be examined using behavioral, eyetracking,as well as functional MRI techniques. This project has the potential to have tremendous theoretical impact, and ultimately could inform instructional practice in schools.