Foveal

About: Foveal is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2652 publications have been published within this topic receiving 94120 citations.

Relationship between facilitation at threshold and suprathreshold contour integration

Abstract: We reevaluate the facilitation at threshold previously reported between aligned micropatterns and assess the role of such lateral spatial interactions in suprathreshold contour integration tasks. Contrary to previous claims, we show that these interactions are phase dependent. Furthermore, they are clearly evident only for foveal viewing, are not evident for curved alignments (>20°), and do not produce any suprathreshold consequence for contrast perception. Such findings question their usefulness for contour integration of smoothly curved suprathreshold paths.

Semantic preview benefit in eye movements during reading: A parafoveal fast-priming study.

Abstract: Eye movements in reading are sensitive to foveal and parafoveal word features. Whereas the influence of orthographic or phonological parafoveal information on gaze control is undisputed, there has been no reliable evidence for early parafoveal extraction of semantic information in alphabetic script. Using a novel combination of the gaze-contingent fast-priming and boundary paradigms, we demonstrate semantic preview benefit when a semantically related parafoveal word was available during the initial 125 ms of a fixation on the pretarget word (Experiments 1 and 2). When the target location was made more salient, significant parafoveal semantic priming occurred only at 80 ms (Experiment 3). Finally, with short primes only (20, 40, 60 ms), effects were not significant but were numerically in the expected direction for 40 and 60 ms (Experiment 4). In all experiments, fixation durations on the target word increased with prime durations under all conditions. The evidence for extraction of semantic information from the parafoveal word favors an explanation in terms of parallel word processing in reading.

The zoom lens of attention: Simulating shuffled versus normal text reading using the SWIFT model

Abstract: Assumptions on the allocation of attention during reading are crucial for theoretical models of eye guidance. The zoom lens model of attention postulates that attentional deployment can vary from a sharp focus to a broad window. The model is closely related to the foveal load hypothesis, i.e., the assumption that the perceptual span is modulated by the difficulty of the fixated word. However, these important theoretical concepts for cognitive research have not been tested quantitatively in eye movement models. Here we show that the zoom lens model, implemented in the SWIFT model of saccade generation, captures many important patterns of eye movements. We compared the model's performance to experimental data from normal and shuffled text reading. Our results demonstrate that the zoom lens of attention might be an important concept for eye movement control in reading.