Effects of foveal processing difficulty on the perceptual span in reading: Implications for attention and eye movement control.

Henderson, John M.; Ferreira, Fernanda

doi:10.1037/0278-7393.16.3.417

Cited by 435 publications

(728 citation statements)

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“…One can also deduce a successor effect from Henderson and Ferreira's (1990) proposal of dynamical attention modulation described above in the context of lag effects. Specifically, if the foveal word n is of Distributed Processing in Fixation Durations 12 low frequency, the focus of attention should be narrower, and therefore there should be less of an influence of the parafoveal word n+1 on the duration of fixation n (White, Rayner, & Liversedge, 2005; but see also Henderson & Ferreira, 1993, Kennison & Clifton, 1995, for some negative evidence).…”

Section: Successor Effectsmentioning

confidence: 88%

“…So far all arguments have applied to the case of single-fixation reading. Do we need to qualify our reasoning if word n is the target of two or more successive fixations?First, refixations might reflect a lexical-processing difficulty for word n. If refixations are correlated with a focusing of attention on this word, that is if they indicate an increase in foveal load (Henderson & Ferreira, 1990), then the properties of word n should be more influential than those of word n-1 and word n+1. Also, for a simple statistical reason, properties of word n should have a larger influence on gaze durations arising from refixation patterns than on single-fixation durations: Multiple fixations are multiple measures and averaging (or summing) suppresses noise.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Tracking the mind during reading: The influence of past, present, and future words on fixation durations.

Kliegl

Nuthmann

Engbert

2006

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

514

679

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Reading requires the orchestration of visual, attentional, language-related, and oculomotor processing constraints. This study replicates previous effects of frequency, predictability, and length of fixated words on fixation durations in natural reading and demonstrates new effects of these variables related to previous and next words. Results are based on fixation durations recorded from 222 persons, each reading 144 sentences. Such evidence for distributed processing of words across fixation durations challenges psycholinguistic immediacy-of-processing and eye-mind assumptions. Most of the time the mind processes several words in parallel at different perceptual and cognitive levels. Eye movements can help to unravel these processes.Keywords: eye movements, fixation duration, gaze, word recognition, reading Reading is a fairly recent cultural invention. The perceptual, attentional, and oculomotor processes enabling this remarkable and complex human skill had been in place for a long time before the first sentence was read. Of course, reading also fundamentally presupposes language, reasoning, and memory processes. If we want to understand how internal processes of the mind and external stimuli play together in the generation of complex action, reading may serve as an ideal sample case, because, despite its complexity, it occurs in settings that are very amenable to experimental control. In addition, the measurement of eye movements yields high-resolution time series that have proven to be very sensitive to factors at all levels of the behavioral and cognitive hierarchy. Most importantly, we already know or can determine basic perceptual, attentional, and oculomotor constraints which any theory of reading and any computational model implementing such a theory at a behavioral microlevel must respect.Looking at the eyes, reading proceeds as an alternating sequence of fixations (lasting 150 to 300 ms) and saccades (30 ms). Information uptake is largely restricted to fixations. For example, fixation durations reliably decrease with the printed frequency of words and with their predictability from prior words of the sentence. Beyond these uncontroversial facts, however, much still needs to be learned about perceptual and attentional processes and properties of words that guide the eyes through a sentence. Starr and Rayner (2001, p. 156) highlighted the following three issues as particularly controversial: "(1) the extent to which eye-movement behavior is affected by low-level oculomotor factors versus higher-level cognitive processes; (2) how much information is extracted from the right of fixations; and (3) whether readers process information from more than one word at a time." Distributed Processing in Fixation Durations 4In this article, we report new empirical results relating to each of these issues. We also present a data-analytic framework within which these issues can be addressed simultaneously and propose a set of theoretical principles which account for a complex set of experimental observations....

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Section: Successor Effectsmentioning

confidence: 88%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Tracking the mind during reading: The influence of past, present, and future words on fixation durations.

Kliegl

Nuthmann

Engbert

2006

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

514

679

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“…We speculate that the effect may be related to attentional processes associated with right MFG function. During reading, attention is typically programmed to shift to the next word as analysis succeeds on the current word (Henderson and Ferreira, 1990;Reichle et al, 2003). However, if syntactic analysis is more difficult, as is the case in the higher syntactic surprisal condition, this controlled shift of attention may be delayed, leading to less activity tied to the current fixation in the high than low surprisal condition.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language structure in the brain: A fixation-related fMRI study of syntactic surprisal in reading

et al. 2016

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How is syntactic analysis implemented by the human brain during language comprehension? The current study combined methods from computational linguistics, eyetracking, and fMRI to address this question. Subjects read passages of text presented as paragraphs while their eye movements were recorded in an MRI scanner. We parsed the text using a probabilistic context-free grammar to isolate syntactic difficulty. Syntactic difficulty was quantified as syntactic surprisal, which is related to the expectedness of a given word's syntactic category given its preceding context. We compared words with high and low syntactic surprisal values that were equated for length, frequency, and lexical surprisal, and used fixation-related (FIRE) fMRI to measure neural activity associated with syntactic surprisal for each fixated word. We observed greater neural activity for high than low syntactic surprisal in two predicted cortical regions previously identified with syntax: left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and less robustly, left anterior superior temporal lobe (ATL). These results support the hypothesis that left IFG and ATL play a central role in syntactic analysis during language comprehension. More generally, the results suggest a broader cortical network associated with syntactic prediction that includes increased activity in bilateral IFG and insula, as well as fusiform and right lingual gyri.© 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords:Language Syntax Surprisal Reading Eye movements fMRI IntroductionA complete theory of the human brain must include a description of the neural networks responsible for language processing. Comprehension of connected sentences requires the ability to retrieve words from the lexicon and relate those words to each other, as the input is encountered in real time. The system for creating these groupings is known as syntax, and is generally thought of as a set of computations specifying syntactic categories such as noun and verb, and stating how those categories combine into increasingly larger constituents such as noun phrases, verb phrases, and clauses. The constituent structure of a sentence is the frame on which interpretations are built; the same words will have radically different meanings depending on that structure (e.g., the dog bit the man vs. the man bit the dog). Thus, the human ability to understand language is based both on lexical knowledge and syntactic computations.In this study, we focused on understanding how the human brain implements the syntactic component of the human language faculty. Specifically, we were interested in the nature of the cortical systems that compute syntactic representations during online language comprehension. Three regions have traditionally been identified as candidates for syntactic processing (Fedorenko et al., 2012;Friederici and Kotz, 2003;Grodzinsky and Friederici, 2006;Kaan and Swaab, 2002). Historically, Broca's area or left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) has been most associated with syntax (Ben-Shachar et al., 2003;Ben-Shachar et al., 2004;...

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“…For example, Henderson and Ferreira (1990) used the boundary technique and manipulated foveal processing difficulty while also varying the availability of parafoveal information. They found that difficult foveal processing led to the reader obtaining no parafoveal preview from the word to the right of fixation.…”

Section: The Effect Of Lexical and Sentential Constraintmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research.

Rayner

1998

Psychological Bulletin

6,141

231

5,590

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Recent studies of eye movements in reading and other information processing tasks, such as music reading, typing, visual search, and scene perception, are reviewed. The major emphasis of the review is on reading as a specific example of cognitive processing. Basic topics discussed with respect to reading are (a) the characteristics of eye movements, (b) the perceptual span, (c) integration of information across saccades, (d) eye movement control, and (e) individual differences (including dyslexia). Similar topics are discussed with respect to the other tasks examined. The basic theme of the review is that eye movement data reflect moment-to-moment cognitive processes in the various tasks examined. Theoretical and practical considerations concerning the use of eye movement data are also discussed.Many studies using eye movements to investigate cognitive processes have appeared over the past 20 years. In an earlier review, I (Rayner, 1978b) argued that since the mid-1970s we have been in a third era of eye movement research and that the success of research in the current era would depend on the ingenuity of researchers in designing interesting and informative studies. It would appear from the vast number of studies using eye movement data over the past 20 years that research in this third era is fulfilling the promise inherent in using eye movement behavior to infer cognitive processes. The first era of eye movement research extended from Javal's initial observations concerning the role of eye movements in reading in 1879 (see Huey, 1908) up until about 1920. During this era, many basic facts about eye movements were discovered. Issues such as saccadic suppression (the fact that we do not perceive information during an eye movement), saccade latency (the time that it takes to initiate an eye movement), and the size of the perceptual span (the region of effective vision) were of concern in this era. The second era, which coincided with the behaviorist movement in experimental psychology, tended to have a more applied focus, and little research was undertaken with eye movements to infer cognitive processes. Although classic work by Tinker (1946) on reading and by Buswell (1935) on scene perception was carried out during this era, in retrospect, most of the work seems to have focused on the eye movements per se (or on surface aspects of the task being investigated). Tinker's (1958) final review ended on the rather pessimistic note that almost every-

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Effects of foveal processing difficulty on the perceptual span in reading: Implications for attention and eye movement control.

Cited by 435 publications

References 62 publications

Tracking the mind during reading: The influence of past, present, and future words on fixation durations.

Tracking the mind during reading: The influence of past, present, and future words on fixation durations.

Language structure in the brain: A fixation-related fMRI study of syntactic surprisal in reading

Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research.

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