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

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-

Transsaccadic representation of layout: What is the time course of boundary extension?

“…This interval can be divided into three components: the masked interval (during which fixation was maintained; 42 ms) the saccade latency (the time required to initiate the saccade following test picture onset; 264 ms), and the saccade duration (64 ms (Carpenter, 1988;Rayner, 1998). This suggests that observers were neither delaying saccades to test pictures nor initiating them prior to the test picture's onset.…”

Scene gist categorization by pigeons.

“…Given that scene gist recognition occurs within a single eye fixation (Eckstein et al, 2006;Torralba et al, 2006), and that fixation durations are generally tied to the processing times required for various visual recognition tasks (Nuthmann, Smith, Engbert, & Henderson, 2010;Rayner, 1998), it seems a reasonable assumption that pigeons may both require longer stimulus durations to recognize gist and tend make longer fixation durations than humans, both by roughly an order of magnitude.…”

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

“…This assumption implies that gaze duration, defined as the sum of all fixations on a word when it is first encountered during reading (i.e., during first-pass reading), is diagnostic of processing time. Indeed, gaze duration has been used as the preferred dependent variable in much psycholinguistic research using eye-movement measures (see Rayner, 1998, for a review). According to these assumptions, there is no distributed processing of words across fixations on different words.…”