Eye movements in reading and information processing.

Abstract

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-

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

“…Characteristics of the writing system also influence eye movements (Osaka, 1989;Peng, Orchard, & Stem, 1983;Sun, Morita, & Stark, 1985). A crucial point that has emerged recently is that eye movement measures can be used to infer moment-to-moment cognitive processes in reading (Just & Carpenter, 1980;McConkie, Hogaboam, Wolverton, Zola, & Lucas, 1979;Rayner, 1978b;Rayner, Sereno, Morris, Schmauder, & Clifton, 1989) and that the variability in the measures reflects on-line processing. For example, there is now abufidant evidence that the frequency of a fixated word influences how long readers look at the word (Inhoff 8~ Rayner, 1986;Rayner & Duffy, 1986).…”

“…Many different techniques have been used to estimate the size of the effective visual field or perceptual span in reading. However, most of them have severe limitations that are not discussed here (see Rayner, 1975bRayner, , 1978b for discussion). Rather, the focus is on studies using eye-contingent display tech-4 Ishida and Ikeda (1989) concluded that the visual sensitivity that is suppressed during a saccade recovers only partially during the initial part of a fixation and that it is fully recovered approximately 70 ms after the beginning of the fixation.…”

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

“…Certainly some of these principles are not new (see, e.g., Engbert et al, 2002;Inhoff et al, 2000a;Kennedy et al, 2002;Kolers, 1976;Rayner, 1978). Indeed, they combine into a model that could be tabulated under the heading of "mixed models" by Rayner (1978, …”

“…Indeed, they combine into a model that could be tabulated under the heading of "mixed models" by Rayner (1978, …”

“…Kolers argued that the irregularity of eye movements suggests that the eyes move largely at their own pace, that process monitoring can intervene when necessary, and that the mind sorts out the serial word order quite independently of the order in which words are fixated by the eyes. According to this cognitivelag hypothesis (Rayner, 1977(Rayner, , 1978, linguistic processing of a word still occurs while the eyes Distributed Processing in Fixation Durations 6 already have moved on to the next word, just as in oral reading the eyes tend to run ahead of the voice.In the present article, we propose that Kolers's (1976) proposal deserves a serious reevaluation: Distributed lexical processing of a word across two or three fixations appears to be the rule rather than the exception, very much in agreement with the cognitive-lag hypothesis (e.g., Bouma & de Voogd, 1974; Kolers, 1976). Moreover, fixation durations are simultaneously sensitive to lexical, visual, and oculomotor levels of processing.…”