Week 11-eye movement and reading

Question 1

What does reading require?

Answer 1

Requires different perceptual and cognitive processes combined with knowledge of language and grammar

Question 2

Define Orthography

Answer 2

The study of word letters and word spelling

Question 3

Define Phonology

Answer 3

The study of sounds of words and parts of words

Question 4

Define Semantics

Answer 4

The meaning conveyed by words, phrases and sentences

Question 5

Define Lexicon

Answer 5

The Language / knowledge –Vocabulary of a person (e.g.,
English)

Question 6

What is the normal pattern of
eye movements during reading?

Answer 6

*Needs highly detailed (central) vision for accurate perception
of word form
*I.e. needs to make a fixation on (almost) every word
*Makes short saccades between the words

Question 7

Define saccades

Answer 7

A rapid movement of the eye between fixation points.

Question 8

Define regression in relation to eye movement

Answer 8

About 10%-25% of eye movements move backwards in the text to reprocess information when we read/misread it (can also be known as regression saccades)

Question 9

Define foveal vision

Answer 9

Highly detailed central vision

Question 10

Define parafovea

Answer 10

A region in the retina that circumscribes (restricts) the fovea and is part of the macula lutea.

Question 11

What’s the oculomotor pattern?

Answer 11

Just a demonstration of how we read a sentence

Question 12

Define refixation

Answer 12

It’s fixation but the 2nd+ time you go back to the word

Question 13

Define a return sweep (AKA large regressive saccade)

Answer 13

Return to first part of the text but second line (called a return sweep) only ever make this for the new line of a text if it’s just going back to first sentence that’s called regression

Question 14

What are some key features of the Oculomotor pattern?

Answer 14

*Fixations ~200ms
*Most words receive at least one direct fixation
*Skips ~20%
*Saccades ~15-40ms, ~5-9 chars
*Mostly progressive ~10-15% regressions
*= average reading speed ~250-350wpm (treatments for blind/deaf people consider reading speed, so important)

Question 15

What factors can influence EM behaviour?

Answer 15

1.Characteristics of the visual system
2.Attention
3.Online cognitive processing of text e.g., in an exam would pay attention to words longer
4.Personal characteristics
5.Task differences (reading exam vs casual leisurely reading)
6.Text differences

Question 16

What are the key features of rod cells?

Answer 16

*Lower acuity
*Peripheral retina
*Monochromatic
*Works at lower light intensities

Question 17

What are the key features of cone cells?

Answer 17

*Better acuity
*Central retina
*Trichromatic (colour vision)

Question 18

Where is the fovea located?

Answer 18

It’s pit at the back of the eye (which has a higher conc. of cone photoreceptor cells)

Question 19

True or false: directly looking at
something = high detail

Answer 19

True, the distance goes out to the periphery of the vision + the further out to the side from where you’re looking = much less
detail (so more difficult to identify things)

Question 20

Visual system: Define visual crowding

Answer 20

Letters compressed with no gaps

Question 21

Visual system: Explain what is meant by “Greater further into the periphery”

Answer 21

Further into the periphery=loss of spatial resolution (e.g., loss of detail=more pixelated) and greater convergence to other cells

Question 22

Visual system: What does Bouma’s (1970) graph show?

Answer 22

-shows difficulty distinguishing individual letters (experiment shows visual crowding)
-found letter moved further from central letter to periphery, letters flanked (2 x’s) by other letters, makes it harder to identify middle later so decrease in accuracy due to crowding effect
-further out of periphery=worse resolution so harder determining/identifying word due to visual crowding

Question 23

What’s the role of attention in reading?

Answer 23

*Mostly deployed to upcoming text (ahead of the point of fixation) to begin processing
*Small allocation behind the fixation
*Single line

Question 24

Define word identification span

Answer 24

the area where your focused attention is going on and tells us about the area we’re focused enough on to identify words (slightly asymmetric (~4L-7R)– close to
average progressive saccade size (7 characters ahead seen in BCP))

Question 25

How did Underwood & McConkie,(1985) investigate with boundary change paradigm?

Answer 25

-used an eyetracker where when they passed a word on the boundary, it triggered a change in words in the sentence
-either explicitly ask them if they noticed a change OR implicitly (seeing whether processing is effective e.g., longer fixation duration in the word that’s changed)
-not a lot of people noticed this different=7 characters ahead pay attention to

Question 26

What factors in attention can help to plan eye movements and to start constraining your lexical identity search to process the word quicker? (According to the Gaze-contingent moving window paradigm (McConkie & Rayner 1975))

Answer 26

*Perceptual span
*Asymmetric – spans around 4 characters to left and 15 characters to right of fixation
*Constrained under higher foveal load
*Information about word form, inter-word spacing

Question 27

What’s the Gaze-contingent moving window paradigm? (McConkie & Rayner 1975)

Answer 27

-uses eye tracker where wherever you’re reading, it has a certain number of characters ahead/behind the bit you’re on (aka a window) BUT the rest of it is either blurred or covered by other letters e.g. XXXX
-shows word identity not necessarily used

Question 28

How do we know this is based on attention and not the visual system with what we perceive?

Answer 28

*Reversed for orthographies that are read the other way (e.g. Hebrew)
*Shrunk for more dense (/complicated orthographies; e.g. Chinese, perceptual span=1L (1 character to the left) and 3R) showing a lot more attention required to process hence why the span shrunk
*Not affected by parafoveal magnification (making the text size larger the same is seen regardless of text size)

Question 29

What 2 competing models are there in attention?

Answer 29

1.E-Z Reader – serial
2.SWIFT – parallel

Question 30

Explain the E-Z Reader model (Reichle et al. 2003, 2009; Reichle 2011)

Answer 30

*Attention deployed to one word at a time (aka serially)
2 stages of lexical processing:
1st stage – Familiarity check (n) (saccade planned after first stage is complete via oculomotor system)
*2nd stage completed as well before saccade executed= attention shifts to the next word – -both stages of lexical processing of word (n+x) can’t be completed before the saccade programme is implemented (intervening words are ‘skipped’)
*If 2nd stage isn’t completed before the saccade is executed= a regression may be programmed to return and complete processing

Question 31

Explain the SWIFT model (Engbert & Kliegl, 2011; Engbert et al. 2005)

Answer 31

*Parallel model (several words attended to/processed at a time)
*Words around point of fixation/visual scene activated to different extents, dependent on early low-level processing which occurs in parallel (ones in foveal vision have highest activation as they have the best/most sensory info coming in)
*Saccadic shifts are programmed at random intervals to the word receiving highest activation
*Shift might be delayed up to a point by higher processing difficulty on foveated word n than planned saccade target – if delay isn’t sufficient to complete processing before a saccade, activation for this word will be increased and therefore increase likelihood of later regressive saccade

Question 32

What does SWIFT stand for?

Answer 32

Saccade generation With Inhibition by Foveal Targets

Question 33

What has online processing shown?

Answer 33

*Clear effects of certain text characteristics on metrics such as fixation duration
*Looking at effect of different manipulations on different measures can help us understand how text is processed during reading
*Manipulate a target word itself or sentence context and compare oculomotor behaviour on target word e.g., word length, word frequency, sentence predictability, sentence plausibility, syntactic ambiguity etc.

Question 34

Single fixation duration, first fixation duration, gaze duration, go-past duration, skipping probability, refixation probability,: What do these mean?

Answer 34

Basically, higher duration numbers and lower probabilities mean it’s more difficult to process

Question 35

What’s involved in early processing?

Answer 35

-single fixation duration
-first fixation duration
-skipping probability –the initial familiarity/identification stages

Question 36

What’s involved in late processing?

Answer 36

-total gaze duration
-regression probability
-go-past duration – the stuff that comes after
-integration into wider representation of the text

Question 37

What’s the effect of word length on reading?

Answer 37

*Short words are processed quicker
*Perceptual effect: same pattern X-strings
Opening night was held at a RED theatre in the centre of London. (XXX)

Opening night was held at a SPECIAL theatre in the centre of London. (XXXXXXX)

Question 38

What’s the effect of word frequency on reading?

Answer 38

*Less frequently encountered words take longer to process (e.g. high freq=town/low freq=cove)
*It’s a measure of successful word identification

Question 39

What did Fitzsimmons, Weal, & Drieghe 2014 WebSci find on the effect of word frequency on reading when it involved reading on websites?

Answer 39

*Compared normal reading with skim-reading in P’s
*Typical text or text with hyperlinks in it
F:
*Loss of word frequency effect for unlinked words demonstrates that when skimming text with hyperlinks, readers only tend to
process the linked words properly
*Real-world application: Don’t put
important information in between
hyperlinks!

Question 40

Wahat’s the effect of predictability on reading?

Answer 40

Words that are easier to predict from preceding context are
processed quicker
E.g.:
High predictability:
Russell had hurt his hand in the door of the car. He had trapped his finger while playing.
Neutral:
Russell had to go to the hospital. He had trapped his finger while playing. (single fixation duration longer for this than HP)

Question 41

What more general effects of text can impact reading?

Answer 41

Font, language, difficulty of content and display format