Nowadays, eye movements methodology is one of the most important ones to assess the understanding process immediately (online). This technique, which is widely used in the study of lexical access and syntactic parsing, recently has been used to analyse larger parts of information beyond words, such as clauses, complete sentences, paragraphs and even images and comics. Also, the simultaneous effect with other methodologies such as thinking out loud or more elaborate (off-line) tasks such as memory or oral summaries have also been analysed. These kinds of studies are at the forefront of relating both methodologies in the educational context. In this symposium, four studies are presented. Studies focus on how the patterns of eye movements can be related to the best efficiency of summarizing and recalling texts with specific instructions, on comparing how texts or comics are understood by children and adults, on how they analyse unusual photographs by people with different cultures (e. g., Chinese and Spanish), or how the quality of a summary can be predicted by examining the reader's pattern of eye movements before reading expository texts.

Inmaculada Escudero Domínguez is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology of Faculty of Psychology at UNED. Graduate and PhD by the Autonomous University of Madrid, she has made many research stays in several prestigious international centres. She has been Visiting Scholar at Centre for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Universidad Carnegie Mellon (Pittsburgh, EE.UU.). Her main research interest focuses on reading comprehension and its evaluation, the analysis and evaluation of academic texts, the study of eye movements when reading and models of representation of meaning and inferences; topics on which she has led many research papers and doctoral theses. She has numerous national and international publications and conference presentations. She is Associate Director of the journal Psicología Educativa.

Jose A. León is Professor of Psychology at the Autonomous University of Madrid. His teaching is focused on the cognitive mechanisms of language comprehension, knowledge acquisition and reading processes in texts and images understanding. His main research has been developed in the study of cognitive processes of the language and speech comprehension, the inferences, causal cognition, mental representations and reading, with strong implantation in the educational applications and the evaluation of reading competence in children and adolescents (Ecomplec. Pri and Ecomplec.Sec, edited by TEA). His current research focuses on the eye movements study in children and adults when reading text and comics. He is collaborating with several North American and European research groups. Also, he was a Visiting Scholar in the Centre for Cognitive Brain Imaging (CCBI) at Carnegie Mellon University, in the Psychology Departments of the Universities of Minnesota, Pittsburgh, Memphis and Kentucky in the USA, and the University of Leiden in The Netherlands. He has published more than 200 articles, many of them in international impact journals, dozens of books and more than thirty book chapters, many of them international too. He has been PI in more than twenty competitive projects and has led more than a dozen of doctoral theses. He has organized several international congresses. Currently, he is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Psicología Educativa (Q2), and reviewer of several international journals. Also, he is the “Educational Psychology Committee” national representative in the European Federation of Psychologist's Associations (EFPA).