Eye movements are now widely used to investigate cognitive processes during reading, scene perception, and visual search. In this article, research on the following topics is reviewed with respect to reading: (a) the perceptual span (or span of effective vision), (b) preview benefit, (c) eye movement control, and (d) models of eye movements. Related issues with respect to eye movements during scene perception and visual search are also reviewed. It is argued that research on eye movements during reading has been somewhat advanced over research on eye movements in scene perception and visual search and that some of the paradigms developed to study reading should be more widely adopted in the study of scene perception and visual search. Research dealing with "real-world" tasks and research utilizing the visual-world paradigm are also briefly discussed.

https://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~bkbergen/cogs200/Rayner-Bartlett.pdf

Eye movements and attention in reading, scene perception, and visual search.

The present review summarizes research investigating how words are identified parafoveally (and foveally) in reading. Parafoveal and foveal processing are compared when no other concurrent task is required (e.g., in single-word recognition tasks) and when both are required simultaneously (e.g., during reading). We first review methodologies used to study parafoveal processing (e.g., corpus analyses and experimental manipulations, including gaze-contingent display change experiments such as the boundary, moving window, moving mask, and fast priming paradigms). We then turn to a discussion of the levels of representation at which words are processed (e.g., orthographic, phonological, morphological, lexical, syntactic, and semantic). Next, we review relevant research regarding parafoveal processing, summarizing the extent to which words are processed at each of those levels of representation. We then review some of the most controversial aspects of parafoveal processing, as they relate to reading: (1) word skipping, (2) parafoveal-on-foveal effects, and (3) n + 1 and n + 2 preview benefit effects. Finally, we summarize two of the most advanced models of eye movements during reading and how they address foveal and parafoveal processing.

/pdf/parafoveal-processing-in-reading-4yz98xio7e.pdf

Parafoveal processing in reading.

Given that an effect size of d = .4 is a good first estimate of the smallest effect size of interest in psychological research, we already need over 50 participants for a simple comparison of two within-participants conditions if we want to run a study with 80% power. This is more than current practice. In addition, as soon as a between-groups variable or an interaction is involved, numbers of 100, 200, and even more participants are needed. As long as we do not accept these facts, we will keep on running underpowered studies with unclear results. Addressing the issue requires a change in the way research is evaluated by supervisors, examiners, reviewers, and editors. The present paper describes reference numbers needed for the designs most often used by psychologists, including single-variable between-groups and repeated-measures designs with two and three levels, two-factor designs involving two repeated-measures variables or one between-groups variable and one repeated-measures variable (split-plot design). The numbers are given for the traditional, frequentist analysis with p 10. These numbers provide researchers with a standard to determine (and justify) the sample size of an upcoming study. The article also describes how researchers can improve the power of their study by including multiple observations per condition per participant.

/pdf/how-many-participants-do-we-have-to-include-in-properly-461vxpxwok.pdf

How Many Participants Do We Have to Include in Properly Powered Experiments? A Tutorial of Power Analysis with Reference Tables.

This chapter provides a meta-analysis of the factors that govern word skipping in reading. It is concluded that the primary predictor is the length of the word to be skipped. A much smaller effect is due to the processing ease of the word (e.g., the frequency of the word and its predictability in the sentence).

https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/283495/file/598851.pdf

Word skipping: implications for theories of eye movement control in reading

The Acquisition of IT

In research on eye movements in reading, it is common to analyze a number of canonical dependent measures in order to study how the effects of a manipulation unfold over time. Although this gives rise to the well-known multiple comparisons problem, i.e. an inflated probability that the null hypothesis is incorrectly rejected (Type I error), it is accepted standard practice not to apply any correction procedures. Instead, there is a widespread belief that corrections are not necessary because the increase in false positives is too small to matter. To our knowledge, no formal argument has ever been made to justify this assumption. Here, we report an investigation of this issue using Monte Carlo simulations. Our results show that false positives are in fact increased to unacceptable levels when no correction is applied, which casts doubt on the assumptions that Type I error rate increases are too small to matter in practice. We also tested two stricter alternative criteria for determining the reliability of an effect and found that the Bonferroni correction controls false positives effectively while only moderately reducing power. Thus, there is little reason why the Bonferroni correction should not be made a standard requirement for analyses of eye movement data in reading.

False positive rates in standard analyses of eye movements in reading arXiv:1504.06896 [stat.AP]

Readers continuously receive parafoveal information about the upcoming word in addition to the foveal information about the currently fixated word. Previous research (Inhoff, Radach, Starr, & Greenberg, 2000) showed that the presence of a parafoveal word which was similar to the foveal word facilitated processing of the foveal word. In three experiments, we used the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) to manipulate the parafoveal information that subjects received before or while fixating a target word (e.g. news) within a sentence. Specifically a reader’s parafovea could contain a repetition of the target (news), a correct preview of the post-target word (once), an unrelated word (warm), random letters (cxmr), a nonword neighbor of the target (niws), a semantically related word (tale), or a nonword neighbor of that word (tule). Target fixation times were significantly lower in the parafoveal repetition condition than in all other conditions, suggesting that foveal processing can be facilitated by parafoveal repetition. We present a simple model framework that can account for these effects.

Data from: Foveal-parafoveal overlap can facilitate ongoing word identification during reading. In Keith Rayner Eye Movements in Reading Data Collection.

Bernhard Angele

Papers

False positive rates in standard analyses of eye movements in reading arXiv:1504.06896 [stat.AP]

Data from: Foveal-parafoveal overlap can facilitate ongoing word identification during reading. In Keith Rayner Eye Movements in Reading Data Collection.

Sensory gating is related to positive and disorganised schizotypy in contrast to smooth pursuit eye movements and latent inhibition.