Mathematical models have become an important tool for understanding the control of eye movements during reading. Main goals of the development of the SWIFT model (R. Engbert, A. Longtin, & R. Kliegl, 2002) were to investigate the possibility of spatially distributed processing and to implement a general mechanism for all types of eye movements observed in reading experiments. The authors present an advanced version of SWIFT that integrates properties of the oculomotor system and effects of word recognition to explain many of the experimental phenomena faced in reading research. They propose new procedures for the estimation of model parameters and for the test of the model's performance. They also present a mathematical analysis of the dynamics of the SWIFT model. Finally, within this framework, they present an analysis of the transition from parallel to serial processing.In modern society, reading is a central skill, which demonstrates how efficiently a range of different cognitive processes (e.g., visual information processing, word recognition, attention, oculomotor control) can work together to perform a complex everyday task. Consequently, a full account of how we read is among the crucial problems of cognitive research. Here, we focus on the fact that eye movements in reading represent an important example for a coupled cognitive-motor system. Therefore, a detailed analysis of the interface between high-level cognition (word recognition) and eye-movement control (saccade generation) is essential to contribute to our knowledge of reading.The measurement, analysis, and modeling of eye movements is one of the most powerful approaches to studying the way visual information is (a) processed by the human mind and (b) used to guide our actions (Findlay & Gilchrist, 2003). Measurements of fixation durations on words or on regions of text are central for investigating cognitive processes underlying reading (Liversedge & Findlay, 2000;Rayner, 1998). Therefore, it is of central importance to develop a detailed understanding of how the experimental observables are related to the underlying cognitive systems.Over the last decades, there has been a considerable increase of knowledge about eye movements and visual information processing (e.g., Hyönä, Radach, & Deubel, 2003; Radach, Kennedy, & Rayner, 2004;Rayner, 1998). The question of how the contributing cognitive subsystems for a specific task such as reading are coordinated is a research problem representative of questions that we believe cannot be investigated without fully quantitative mathematical models. Although it is still possible to investigate aspects of eye-movement control (e.g., word skipping or programming of refixations) in a nonmathematical way, a fully quantitative approach in which most of the experimental phenomena are integrated is necessary to test the interaction of different theoretical assumptions (e.g., the potential impact of a mechanism for word skipping on refixation behavior). In perspective, computational models can be approximated with ...

As Chinese is written without orthographical word boundaries (i.e., spaces), it is unclear whether saccade targets are selected on the basis of characters or words and whether saccades are aimed at the beginning or the centre of words. Here, we report an experiment where 30 Chinese readers read 150 sentences while their eye movements were monitored. They exhibited a strong tendency to fixate at the word centre in single-fixation cases and at the word beginning in multiple-fixation cases. Different from spaced alphabetic script, initial fixations falling at the end of words were no more likely to be followed by a refixation than initial fixations at word centre. Further, single fixations were shorter than first fixations in two-fixation cases, which is opposite to what is found in Roman script. We propose that Chinese readers dynamically select the beginning or centre of words as saccade targets depending on failure or success with segmentation of parafoveal word boundaries.

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