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Evidence for direct control of eye movements during reading.

Dambacher, M., Slattery, T., Yang, J., Kliegl, R. and Rayner, K., 2013. Evidence for direct control of eye movements during reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 39 (5), 1468 - 1484 .

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DOI: 10.1037/a0031647

Abstract

It is well established that fixation durations during reading vary with processing difficulty, but there are different views on how oculomotor control, visual perception, shifts of attention, and lexical (and higher cognitive) processing are coordinated. Evidence for a one-to-one translation of input delay into saccadic latency would provide a much needed constraint for current theoretical proposals. Here, we tested predictions of such a direct-control perspective using the stimulus-onset delay (SOD) paradigm. Words in sentences were initially masked and, upon fixation, were individually unmasked with a delay (0-ms, 33-ms, 66-ms, 99-ms SODs). In Experiment 1, SODs were constant for all words in a sentence; in Experiment 2, SODs were manipulated on target words, while non-targets were unmasked without delay. In accordance with predictions of direct control, non-zero SODs entailed equivalent increases in fixation durations in both experiments. Yet, a population of short fixations pointed to rapid saccades as a consequence of low-level information at non-optimal viewing positions rather than of lexical processing. Implications of these results for theoretical accounts of oculomotor control are discussed.

Item Type:Article
ISSN:0096-1523
Uncontrolled Keywords:stimulus-onset delay (SOD); oculomotor control; fixation durations; sentence reading
Group:Bournemouth University Business School
ID Code:22642
Deposited By: Symplectic RT2
Deposited On:13 Oct 2015 11:29
Last Modified:14 Mar 2022 13:53

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