Ocular Position in Sentence-Picture Comparisons

Abstract

If oculomotor activity in verifying orally presented sentences about pictures is important, then there ought to be an increase in such activity in the area of a picture in which a critical feature in the analysis is missing. If the process is purely cognitive, there ought not be greater activity in that area. 32 sentences combining such attributes as positive/negative, true/false, subject of sentence shown/not shown, "before"/"after," resulting in sentences such as, "Star isn't before square," were orally presented to 10 college-age students along with tachistoscopically presented pictures with either an object on the right or left. True/false reaction times were recorded as well as horizontal eye fixations for the time interval via an electromyograph and chart recorder. Mean eye-location/time indices indicated that some sentence types seemed to be analyzed predominantly visually and others predominantly cognitively. Results suggested that there is a need for the development of a combined visual imagery and cognitive model.