Michael Eskenazi
Associate Professor of Psychology
Eskenazi completed his doctoral degree in experimental psychology at Kent State University with a focus in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. His work focuses on understanding how readers identify, process, learn, and use words during reading and how individual differences in reading skill moderate those processes. He enjoys working closely with students in his eye-tracking lab, mentoring senior research projects, and taking students on study abroad trips.
- PhD, Experimental Psychology, Kent State University, 2016
- MA, Experimental Psychology, Towson University, 2011
- BA, Psychology, Quinnipiac University, 2009
- BA, Spanish, Quinnipiac University, 2009
Biography
Eskenazi is the department's specialist in cognitive psychology, which focuses on the mental processes of attention, language, memory, and perception. His specific area of expertise is in psycholinguistics, and he studies how readers identify, process, learn, and use words during reading. He uses eye-tracking technology to study readers' eye movement behavior, which is a reflection of their language processes. This research is conducted in the Reading, Eye-Tracking, and Individual Differences Lab (REAiD Lab).
Eskenazi regularly works with undergraduate students both in and out of the classroom. In his classes, students learn about cognitive processes, conduct and design experiments, and analyze data. He also mentors students each semester in his lab as they assist with his research and design their own studies. Students interested in working with Professor Eskenazi should email or meet with him to discuss working in the REAiD Lab.
More About Michael Eskenazi
Areas of Expertise
- Cognitive Science
- Psycholinguistics
- Experimental Psychology
Course Sampling
- Memory in Everyday Life
- Cognitive Psychology
- Sensation and Perception
- Research Methods
- Senior Project
- European History and Ethics in Psychology (Study Abroad)
- Psycholinguistics (Study Abroad)
- Visual word form processing
- Eye movement behavior during reading
- Lexical acquisition
- Individual differences in reading skill
- Sociolinguistics and applied linguistics
- Eskenazi, M. A., Ferguson, C. J. & Semenyna, S. (2026). Pipelines and master bedrooms: How harmful is harmful language?, Journal of Open Inquiry in Behavioral Sciences, 5(6).
- Eskenazi, M. A. (2024). Best practices for cleaning eye movement data in reading research, Behavior Research Methods, 56, 2083-2093.
- Eskenazi, M. A., Askew, R. L., & Folk, J. R. (2023). Precision in the measurement of lexical expertise: The selection of optimal items for a spelling assessment, Behavior Research Methods, 55, 623-632.
- Eskenazi, M. A., *Kemp, P, Folk, J. R. (2021). Word skipping during the lexical acquisition process, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74(3), 548-558.
- Eskenazi, M. A., & *Nix, B. (2021). Individual differences in the desirable difficulty effect during lexical acquisition, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 47(1), 45-52.
- Garcia, S. L., *Nalven, M., *Ault, A., & Eskenazi, M. A. (2020). tDCS as a treatment for anxiety and related cognitive deficits, International Journal of Psychophysiology, 158, 172-177.
- Eskenazi, M. A., *Swischuk, N., Folk, J. R., & Abraham, A. N. (2018). Uninformative contexts support word learning for high-skill spellers, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 44(12), 2019-2025.
- Folk, J. R., & Eskenazi, M. A., (2018). Eye-tracking to distinguish comprehension-based and oculomotor-based regressive eye movements during reading, Journal of Visualized Experiments, 140.
- Eskenazi, M. A., & Folk, J. R. (2017). Regressions during reading: The cost depends on the cause, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 24(4), 1211-1216.
- Folk, J. R., & Eskenazi, M. A., (2016). Eye movement behavior and individual differences in word identification during reading. In Was, C. A., Sansosti, F. J., & Morris, B. J. (Eds.), Eye Tracking Technology Applications in Educational Research. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.