What are the costs of degraded parafoveal previews during silent reading?

Abstract

It has been suggested that the preview benefit effect is actually a combination of preview benefit and preview costs. Marx et al. (2015) proposed that visually degrading the parafoveal preview reduces the costs associated with traditional parafoveal letter masks used in the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975), thus leading to a more neutral baseline. We report 2 experiments of skilled adults reading silently. In Experiment 1, we found no compelling evidence that degraded previews reduced processing costs associated with traditional letter masks. Moreover, participants were highly sensitive to detecting degraded display changes. Experiment 2 used the boundary detection paradigm (Slattery, Angele, & Rayner, 2011) to explore whether participants were capable of detecting actual letter changes or if they were responding purely to changes in degradation. Half of the participants were instructed to respond to any noticed display changes; the other half were instructed to respond only to changes in letter identities. Participants were highly sensitive to degraded changes. In fact, these changes were so apparent that they reduced the sensitivity to letter masks. In the context of the model proposed by Angele, Slattery, and Rayner (2016), we suggest that degraded previews interfere with the attentional stage, as evidenced by the general lack of foveal load effects. In summary, we found that increasingly degrading parafoveal letter masks does not reduce their processing costs in adults, but that both degraded valid and invalid previews introduce additional costs in terms of greater display change awareness. (PsycINFO Database Record

Parafoveal degradation during reading reduces preview costs only when it is not perceptually distinct

“…The reduction in preview costs in Experiments 1a-2a replicates Marx et al's (2015) original findings and provides further evidence that invalid masks may inflate the preview effect (Hutzler et al, 2019;Marx et al, 2016Marx et al, , 2017. Critically, however, the present data also demonstrate that the use of parafoveal degradation in such studies has the unintended consequence of adding additional costs due to the presence of highly distinct changes at the target word location (see Vasilev et al, 2018;Experiment 2). This may explain why some studies (Hutzler et al, 2019, Experiment 4;Vasilev et al, 2018, Experiment 1) have failed to replicate the decrease in preview costs on the target word that Marx et al (2015) originally reported.…”

“…Critically, however, the present data also demonstrate that the use of parafoveal degradation in such studies has the unintended consequence of adding additional costs due to the presence of highly distinct changes at the target word location (see Vasilev et al, 2018;Experiment 2). This may explain why some studies (Hutzler et al, 2019, Experiment 4;Vasilev et al, 2018, Experiment 1) have failed to replicate the decrease in preview costs on the target word that Marx et al (2015) originally reported. In this sense, the present data show that the incremental boundary technique (Marx et al, 2015) can be a very useful tool for studying the preview costs associated with invalid masks.…”

“…Once the target word boundary was crossed, all degraded words changed to nondegraded (see Figure 4 for an illustration). This manipulation is identical to previous studies (Marx et al, 2015(Marx et al, , 2016(Marx et al, , 2017Vasilev et al, 2018). Participants were not told anything about the manipulation before the experiment and were simply asked to read for comprehension.…”

“…Nevertheless, Hutzler et al (2019) found this effect on the pre-target word, thus demonstrating a reduction in parafoveal-on-foveal effects caused by the letter mask. Vasilev et al (2018) also attempted to replicate Marx et al's (2015) result in a sample of adult English readers. In Experiment 1, they failed to find conclusive evidence for a reduction in preview costs by administering increasing levels of degradation to letter-mask previews.…”

Word frequency, predictability, and return-sweep saccades: Towards the modeling of eye movements during paragraph reading.

“…With the boundary paradigm, a lack of valid preview necessitates the presence of an invalid preview. Recent research indicates that "preview benefit" effects in such boundary paradigm studies are actually a complex mixture of valid preview benefits and invalid preview costs (Hutzler et al, 2013;Kliegl, Hohenstein, Yan, & McDonald 2013;Marx, Hawelka, Schuster, & Hutzler, 2015;Vasilev, Slattery, Kirkby, & Angele, 2018). Therefore, exploring how the absence of preview during return-sweeps influences lexical processing will also advance our understanding of "preview benefit" effects within the boundary paradigm.…”