Andriana Christofalos has joined the Department of Psychological Sciences at Boise State University as an assistant professor. Her research focuses on how people read, using methods such as eye-tracking to analyze readers’ physical processes. This technology allows her lab to observe details like how quickly readers move between words, when they backtrack in a passage, and how long they fixate on certain words.
Christofalos’s work examines lower-level processes related to reasoning while reading. Her studies range from reading behaviors in individuals with schizophrenia to understanding how people interpret passages containing emojis.
She noted that the study of non-textual elements in written communication is not new. “Back in the day, it was emoticons,” Christofalos said. “A lot of people studied the winking emoticon and how that supports comprehension of sarcasm and irony.”
The current wide use of emojis provides new opportunities for research into multimodal processing—the way readers engage with materials that combine text and other elements such as illustrations or emojis.
Student involvement is a key part of Christofalos’s approach. She described her own path into academia: “Like most students in psychology, I started out wanting to go the clinical route,” she said. “I wanted to be a psychiatrist and go to medical school. Then I joined a research lab and I was just amazed. I knew that this is what I wanted to do.”
Christofalos is now recruiting undergraduate research assistants for her lab at Boise State University. Students will gain experience with eye-tracking tools and help shape future research directions, including potential projects involving emoji usage among digital-native students.
“Students really like helping out with that research,” Christofalos said. “So I’m excited to get started again with Boise State students.”
