Hierarchical resource rationality explains human reading behaviour

Abstract

Reading is a pervasive and cognitively demanding activity that underpins modern human culture. It is a prime instance of a class of tasks where eye movements are coordinated for the purpose of comprehension. Existing theories explain either eye movements or comprehension during reading, but the critical link between the two remains unclear. Here we propose resource-rational optimization as a unifying control principle governing adaptive reading behaviour. Eye movements are selected to maximize expected comprehension while minimizing cognitive and temporal costs, organized hierarchically across nested time scales: fixation decisions support word recognition; sentence-level integration guides skipping and regression; and text-level comprehension goals shape memory construction and rereading. A computational implementation successfully replicates an unprecedented range of findings in human reading, from lexical effects to comprehension outcomes. Together, these results suggest that resource rationality provides a general mechanism for coordinating perception, memory and action in knowledge-intensive human behaviours, offering a principled account of how complex cognitive skills adapt to limited resources. This work shows that human reading behaviour can be explained as hierarchical resource-rational control, unifying eye movements, memory and comprehension in one computational principle.