The 2nd Workshop on Eye Movements and the Assessment of Reading Comprehension took place on June 20–22, 2024 in Zürich, Switzerland. It was organized by Lena Jäger (University of Zürich), Titus von der Malsburg (University of Stuttgart) and Yevgeni Berzak (Technion Israel Institute of Technology). The workshop lasted for two formal days, followed by a joint gathering that allowed the participants to exchange ideas and get to know each other in a more informal setting.




The main idea behind the workshop, as envisioned by its organizers, was to explore how eye-tracking and machine learning technologies can enhance reading assessments. The event was rather successful in fulfilling its goal. It brought together researchers from various fields, including educational science, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, speech and language pathology, eye-tracking-based reading research, and machine learning, which was very inspiring and eye-opening, as it pointed to the need and possibilities for cross-disciplinary research collaborations.
During the two formal days of the workshop, sixteen oral presentations and fourteen poster presentations were given, the topics of which ranged from the methodology of eye-tracking experiments, development of large multilingual eye-tracking data corpora and assessment of the comprehension of the written texts to eye-movements as indicators of proficiency in a language and eye-tracking-while-reading in special populations.








The event was particularly successful in bringing together leading senior researchers from the respective fields and young researchers, who demonstrated high level of knowledge, methodological skills and creativity in their research. The exchange of ideas and experiences was greatly facilitated by the inspiring beauty of the town of Zürich, a perfect place for the events of the kind. We truly enjoyed it, both the posters and talks, and the informal coffees and walks. We are happy that this is a recurring event, and we are looking forward to seeing everyone again soon!