![\"\"](\"https:\/\/world.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/readingposture.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
On reading these first lines, your attention is fully focused on the content of the text.\u00a0Your curiosity about the topic of the article – or simply discovering new information – makes you “cognitively” engaged in word processing.<\/p>\n
Then, during the reading, this commitment will gradually diminish: your reading will accelerate, your eye fixations will be shorter and shorter, and you will perhaps go so far as to ignore certain words, yet essential for a good understanding of the text.\u00a0At this time, the likelihood of recalling specific information from the text is severely restricted.<\/p>\n
So, only important information, content that arouses an emotion, or even an incongruity in the speech, for example, can reactivate your cognitive engagement and bring you back to a full understanding and memorization of the text.<\/p>\n
The few steps presented above schematically summarize the fluctuation of cognitive engagement in reading.\u00a0Just as we find it hard to stay focused for long during a lecture or when watching a movie, our level of attention varies as we read.\u00a0And as we will see, the reader’s posture is an unexpected marker of this.<\/p>\n
But how can our body be involved in this highly intellectual activity of reading?\u00a0What role do the emotions contained in a text play and to what extent is our body sensitive to it?<\/p>\n
Reading is a complex enterprise of\u00a0construction of meaning<\/a>\u00a0which mobilizes a number of skills, for example the grapheme \/ phoneme conversion (from writing to sound) and requires constantly making links between what has just been read and the knowledge stored. in long-term memory in order to build a mental representation of the text that is as coherent as possible.<\/p>\n The reading goal we have in mind sets\u00a0standards for consistency<\/a>\u00a0.\u00a0Thus, these are higher when we read for study purposes than when we read for pleasure or for entertainment.\u00a0And we’re more likely to invest\u00a0additional cognitive effort<\/a>\u00a0if the purpose of our reading is to learn something new.<\/p>\n The reading task therefore has an influence on our cognitive engagement: it plays a crucial role in the way we allocate our cognitive resources to encode textual information in our memory.\u00a0Information that was the center of attention – therefore very active in working memory while reading – is more likely to be incorporated into the memorial representation of the text.<\/p>\n This is why cognitive engagement in reading is essential, especially in a learning situation.\u00a0The more cognitively we are engaged in reading, the more effective comprehension and retention in memory.<\/p>\n Cognitive engagement can be defined as a process in which the reader’s cognitive resources focus on the reading task and are reflected\u00a0in the reader’s behavior<\/a>\u00a0.\u00a0Cognitive resources are for example motivation, attention, memory and even emotions.<\/p>\n Cognitive engagement has been primarily studied in educational psychology to study student motivation and engagement using\u00a0subjective self-report scales<\/a>\u00a0.\u00a0In this case, the readers themselves assess how engaged they were in their reading task.<\/p>\n This subjective method of evaluation has two drawbacks: the first is that the readers evaluate their engagement a posteriori, after the reading task, and the second is that the reader is asked to make aware of an engagement or a disengagement which has not. not necessarily conscious while reading.<\/p>\n Objective qualitative methods have therefore been used to attempt to qualify cognitive engagement during\u00a0learning<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0reading <\/a>tasks<\/a>\u00a0.\u00a0They are based on eye movements, which reveal that the longer a piece of information is fixed, the\u00a0more deeply it is processed<\/a>\u00a0.<\/p>\n Recent studies have examined other means of measuring cognitive engagement during reading, in particular by coupling the oculometric technique – consisting in measuring eye movements – and the technique of capturing postural movements (motion capture).<\/p>\n Eye tracking allows, on the one hand, direct access to textual information processed by the reader, and on the other hand, motion capture offers the possibility of studying how people stand while reading, with millimeter precision.<\/p>\n The results<\/a>\u00a0showed that when readers went through particularly important passages related to a task that had been given to them beforehand, their postural movements were slowed down, almost frozen, in order to effectively integrate the information present in the text.\u00a0Thus, it has been shown that postural stability can reflect the level of cognitive engagement of readers.<\/p>\n Emotional content is omnipresent in our daily lives, on television, on social networks, in the press and in books.\u00a0They play a role in the\u00a0decisions we make<\/a>\u00a0, and also, as we will see, in\u00a0being engaged<\/a>\u00a0in reading a text.<\/p>\n Scientific studies seem to reach a consensus to consider affects according to a\u00a0two<\/a>\u00a0–\u00a0dimensional<\/a>\u00a0structure\u00a0\u00a0:<\/p>\n Researchers have examined the effect of valence on attention to words read and found an\u00a0advantage<\/a>\u00a0for emotional words over neutral words, regardless of the valence polarity (pleasant or unpleasant).<\/p>\nCognitive engagement<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Influence of emotions<\/strong><\/h4>\n
\n