5- How We Read Flashcards
What essentially is reading?
Understanding language visually as we allocate attention
What do visual illusions show?
How our brain creates predictions
What can we often easily distinguish between?
Grammatical from ungrammatical sentences
How might ungrammatical sentences often see as initially?
Acceptable ones
What was the previous measure of studying syntax?
Linguists looking at sentences to decide whether they looked grammatical or not
What was the problem with previous measures of studying syntax?
Not very reliable
Who conducted an actual experiment of studying syntax?
Mahowald et al, 2016
What was involved in Mahowald et al’s experiment?
100 randomly sampled comparisons from Linguistic Inquiry journal
What were the main findings from Mahowald et al’s experiment?
Not a significant result
What was the conclusion from Mahowald et al’s experiment?
Linguists need data and previous measures weren’t a good measure
What is the role of photoreceptors?
To turn light into electrical current
Where does the electrical current travel after photoreceptors?
It goes down the optic nerve into the brain
Where is the blind spot?
Where the optic nerve is
Why is the blind spot a blind spot?
There are no photoreceptors
What does the brain do with the electrical current?
Computes it into visual information so we can see
Is the distribution of photoreceptors even?
No
Where is vision clearest?
In the fovea where photoreceptor density is highest
How much of our visual experience is high acuity and how much is blurry?
5% is high acuity and 95% is blurry
Why is most of our visual experience not blurry? (2 reasons)
Because our brain is very good at focusing on the 5% to give a clear visual experience, and we look around a lot to try and reduce the blur
Where is vision blurriest?
Where there are less photoreceptors
Where is the periphery?
Away from the fovea
What is the purpose of cortical processing?
To emphasise the fovea
How do we read?
By stops- moving the eye, on a word-by-word basis across the page
How do patients with extraocular fibrosis read?
With no eye movement- move the text/head
How does it feel that we read? (we don’t actually)
Smoothly across a line
Why is reading quite visually complex?
We only get a very small amount of visual information at once
What is a fixation?
Our eyes remain typically still
How long is a fixation?
Roughly 250-300ms
What is a saccade?
Ballistic movement of our eyes to another location
How fast is a saccade?
Incredibly quick
What does ballistic mean?
Too quick for you to stop the movement
What is saccadic suppression?
Apparent inhibition of visual input during saccades
What happens during a saccadic suppression?
Brain shuts off the visual field when we’re making a saccade
How many words do we generally fixate on while reading?
Two thirds
How much of large texts do we skip?
About 50%
How much of reading is going back in the text?
10%
How many fixations are regressions?
10-15%
What are the 4 metrics that can be measured in order to explore different experimental effects?
- Fixation durations
- Regression rates
- Word skipping rates
- Saccade distance/speed
What are fixation durations?
The idea that the longer someone looks at a word, the harder they find it to understand
What are regression rates?
The idea that if text is harder then people will generate more regressions
What are word skipping rates?
The idea that if text is really easy then people will skip more words
What do we need to be able to do in order to work out where fixations and saccades happen?
Monitor someone’s eye movement
When did we first have the technology to be able to monitor someone’s eye movement?
About the 70s
What does gaze contingent mean?
We display changes based on what someone can see
What is the idea of the moving window paradigm?
Wherever you are looking in the text changes what someone can see
What did we find that perceptual span is?
3-4 characters to the left
How is perceptual span asymmetric?
You can see quite far forward to the right but not to the left
What kind of effect determines perceptual span?
Psychological not biological
How is perceptual span adapted?
To what we are reading and understand
How does perceptual span differ in languages that are read right-to-left?
Perceptual span is the same size, but in reverse
How does perceptual span increase and decrease?
As a function of text difficulty
What shows that perceptual span is a purely psychological effect?
It adapts to whatever language you are reading
What is reading time based on?
The information that is being conveyed
