Do your eyes give you away? A validation study of eye-movement measures used as indicators for mindless reading

Abstract

Identifying eye-movement measures as objective indicators of mind wandering seems to be a work in progress. We reviewed research comparing eye movements during self-categorized episodes of normal versus mindless reading and found little consensus regarding the specific measures that are sensitive to attentional decoupling during mind wandering. To address this issue of inconsistency, we conducted a new, high-powered eye-tracking experiment and considered all previously identified mindwandering indicators. In our experiment, only three measures (reading time, fixation count, and first-fixation duration) positively predicted self-categorized mindless reading. Aside from these single measures, the word-frequency effect was found to be generally less pronounced during mindless-reading than during normal-reading episodes. To additionally test for convergent validity between the objective and subjective mind-wandering measures, we utilized eye-movement measures as well as thought reports, to examine the effect of metacognitive awareness on mind-wandering behavior. We expected that participants anticipating a difficult comprehension test would mind wander less during reading than would those anticipating an easy test. Although we were able to induce metacognitive expectancies about task difficulty, we found no evidence that these difficulty expectancies affected either subjectively reported or objectively measured mind wandering.

The Electrophysiological Signature of Mind Wandering

“…Although mind wandering probes do not interfere much with task performance, at least during simple cognitive tasks (Wiemers & Redick, 2018), they still interrupt the ongoing task and thus alternative indicators of mind wandering are needed (cf. Steindorf & Rummel, 2019). Different mind wandering indicators have been suggested, such as changes in response time variabilities , changes in pupil dilation , or changes in neural activity (Christoff et al, 2009).…”

Refixation Patterns of Mind-wandering during Real-world Scene Perception

“…Interestingly, previous studies have not been entirely consistent on this measure. Some studies reported that MW was associated with fewer fixations during reading and scene perception (Faber et al, 2020;Krasich et al, 2018), whereas other reported no difference (Uzzaman & Joordens, 2011), or even more fixations during MW Steindorf & Rummel, 2020). A similar mixture of findings has been reported for fixation duration.…”

“…It is worth noting that fewer and longer fixations were not consistently associated with MW in many previous studies (e.g., Faber et al, 2020;Smilek et al, 2010;Steindorf & Rummel, 2020;Uzzaman & Joordens, 2011). While some of the discrepancies might reflect a power issue, the specific task setting may also modulate the relationship between eye movements and MW.…”

“…Over the past few years, an increasing number of studies have investigated the relationship between eye movements and MW (e.g., Faber et al, 2020;Frank et al, 2015;Krasich et al, 2018;Reichle et al, 2010;Steindorf & Rummel, 2020;Uzzaman & Joordens, 2011;Zhang et al, 2020), but so far little attention has been given to scanpaths. Moreover, the majority of those studies were concerned with reading comprehension, which involves quite different gaze control mechanisms (Castelhano & Rayner, 2008;Rayner et al, 2009).…”

“…Another important future line of research would be to relate eye movements during MW to specific content in the scene. This question has been studied in the context of reading comprehension (e.g., the word frequency effect; Reichle et al, 2010;Steindorf & Rummel, 2020). Recently, Henderson and Hayes (2017) showed that fixation placement across real-world scenes is driven by the meaningfulness of local regions.…”