"Eye Movements: A Window On Mind And Brain" by Roger van Gompel

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"One of the most productive areas in eye-movement research is the investigation of reading processes."

"When the line of fixation is brought from its primary position into any other position, the torsional rotation of the eyeball in this second position will be the same as if the eye had been turned around a fixed axis perpendicular to the initial and final directions of the line of fixation. This is known as Listing's law of ocular movements, because it was first stated by him in this form. (Helmholtz, 1925/2000, p. 48, original italics)"

"During fixations the image on the retina is kept largely stationary."

"in reading each fixation takes in about 7 letter spaces, which with standard print at 40 cm means that saccades are about 1.33° long, and so the maximum angular distance from any letter in the line being read is half this, 0.67°."

"At the other extreme, the average size of "within object" saccades in both tea-making and sandwich-making was about 8°, implying that the centre of the viewed target is rarely more than about 4° from the foveal direction"

"According to Deubel et al. (1996), this finding indicates that the absence of position information at the end of the saccade allows the visual system to use extraretinal signals and information about the egocentric target location stored in transsaccadic memory in order to compute a veridical prediction of the postsaccadic target location."

"Today the most comprehensive computational models of visuomotor control in reading are E-Z reader and the SWIFT model, which, on a comparable level of model complexity, account for an impressively wide range of empirical phenomena. These include not just basics such as effects of word frequency and word length on spatial and temporal parameters, but also such intricate phenomena as the modulation of parafoveal preprocessing by foveal processing, the generation of regressions and the so-called "inverted optimal viewing position effect". Interestingly, there are a number of similarities between both families of models, such as the idea of a labile and a non-labile phase of saccade programming and the implementation of saccade amplitude generation based on McConkie et al. (1988). "

"Major differences concern two central questions about the nature of the eye-mind link. While in E-Z reader every interword saccade is assumed to be triggered by a specific word-processing event, saccades are triggered in SWIFT by an autonomous generator which in turn is modulated (delayed) by the mental load of foveal linguistic processing. The second important difference is the degree of spatial and temporal overlap in the processing of words within the perceptual span."

"A special issue of Cognitive Systems Research edited by Erik Reichle includes new or updated versions of no less than six different models: the SWIFT model (Richter, Engbert, & Kliegl, 2006), the E-Z Reader model (Reichle, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 2006), the Glenmore model (Reilly & Radach, 2006), the Competition/Interaction model (Yang, 2006) and the SHARE model (Feng, 2006)."

"As the classic studies of Rayner, McConkie and their colleagues have shown, the "span of letter identification" during a given fixation extents about 8-9 letters to the right and about 4 letters to the left."

"In most current models, such as E-Z reader or SWIFT, there are no explicit mechanisms to simulate the microlevel of word processing."

"One exception is the Glenmore model, which includes a relatively realistic connectionist processing module, where the dynamics of activation and inhibition on the level of letter and word nodes determines the flow of linguistic processing."

"word identification is slower and less accurate in peripheral vision"

"A recent event-related potentials (ERP) experiment also provides some evidence that context can influence the early stages of word identification (Sereno, Brewer, & O'Donnell, 2003)."

"The SWIFT model (Engbert et al., 2005; see also Engbert, Longtin, & Kliegl, 2002; Engbert, Kliegl, & Longtin, 2004; Laubrock, Kliegl, & Engbert, 2006; Richter, Engbert, & Kliegl, 2006) is currently among the most advanced models of eye-movement control, because it reproduces and explains the largest number of experimental phenomena in reading, in particular, the IOVP effect (Section 4; see also Nuthmann et al., 2005)."

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"Perhaps the two most robust findings in studies of eye movements and reading are that (1) fixation time on a word is shorter if the reader has a valid preview of the word prior to fixating it, and (2) fixation time is shorter when the word is easy to identify and understand"

"How long readers look at a word is clearly influenced by how frequent the word is in the language"

"Word familiarity. Although two words may have the same frequency value, they may differ in familiarity (particularly for words that are infrequent)."

"Effects of word familiarity on fixation time (even when frequency and age-of-acquisition are statistically controlled) have been demonstrated in a number of recent studies (Chaffin, Morris, & Seely, 2001; Juhasz & Rayner, 2003; Williams & Morris, 2004)."

"Considerable research has demonstrated that words that are predictable from the preceding context are looked at for less time than words that are not predictable. This result was first demonstrated by Ehrlich and Rayner (1981)"

"It is widely agreed that low-level features like word length and letter identity of the first few letters are parafoveally processed. However, whereas some scholars claim that parafoveal processing is predominantly visual-orthographic in nature (e.g., Rayner, Balota, & Pollatsek, 1986), others posit that effects of parafoveal processing extend to higher linguistic levels (e.g., Kennedy, 2000; Murray, 1998)."

"As we read, we preprocess text that has not yet been fixated. Such preprocessing results in a greater probability of skipping words that are short, frequent or predictable compared to words that are long, infrequent or unpredictable (for reviews see Brysbaert & Vitu, 1998; Rayner, 1998)."

"In contrast, in their Glenmore model, Reilly and Radach (2003) suggest that multiple words can be processed in parallel and that there is competition between words for activation related to linguistic processing."

"The SOLAR model (Davis, 1999) employs a spatial coding scheme to assign letter positions different activation levels according to their location within the letter string. According to the model, the first letter position receives the highest level of activation, followed by the second letter position and so forth."

"The model can account for TL effects because it also includes a separate parameter to measure the amount of similarity in the set of letter nodes."

"The SERIOL model (Whitney, 2001) also assigns varying activation levels to successive letter positions. In addition, it relies on the activation of bigram nodes to encode words. The word casino, for example, can be broken down into 15 bigrams (ca, cs, ci, cn, co, as, ai, etc.). "

"the Overlap Model (Gomez, Perea, & Ratcliff, 2003) can account for TL effects because it assumes that letter representations extend into neighboring letter positions. "

"Adams, M. J. (1979). Models of word recognition. Cognitive Psychology, 11(2), 133-176."

"The most common type of overt interruption of fluent speech, or disfluency, is the filled pause (Bortfield, Leon, Bloom, Schober, & Brennan, 2001). Speakers produce filled pauses (e.g. uh or um) for a variety of reasons, such as to discourage interruptions or to gain additional time to plan utterances (Schacter, Christenfeld, Ravina, & Bilous, 1991)."

"Cooper, R. M. (1974). The control of eye fixation by the meaning of spoken language: a new methodology for the real-time investigation of speech perception, memory, and language processing. Cognitive Psychology, 6(1), 84-107."

"The duration of gazes to objects that are to be named depends, among other things, on the ease of name retrieval (e.g., the gazes are longer when name agreement is low than when it is high, Griffin, 2001) and the ease of word form encoding (e.g., gazes are longer for objects with long names than with short names, Meyer et al., 2003)."

"Eye movements were monitored using an SMI Eyelink-1 eye tracking system."

"During real-world scene perception, we move our eyes about three times each second via very rapid eye movements (saccades) to reorient the high-resolving power of the fovea. Pattern information is acquired only during periods of relative gaze stability (fixations) due to a combination of central suppression and visual masking (Matin, 1974; Thiele, Henning, Buishik, & Hoffman, 2002; Volkman, 1986). Gaze control is the process of directing the eyes through a scene in real time in the service of ongoing perceptual, cognitive, and behavioral activity (Henderson, 2003; Henderson & Hollingworth, 1998, 1999)"

"There are at least three reasons that the study of gaze control is important in real-world scene perception (Henderson, 2003; Henderson & Ferreira, 2004a). First, human vision is active, in the sense that fixation is directed toward task-relevant information as it is needed for ongoing visual and cognitive computations... Second, eye movements provide a window into the operation of selective attention. Indeed, although internal (covert) attention and overt eye movements can be dissociated (Posner & Cohen, 1984), the strong natural relationship between covert and overt attention has recently led some investigators to suggest that studying covert visual attention independently of overt attention is misguided (Findlay, 2004; Findlay & Gilchrist, 2003)... Third, because gaze is typically directed at the current focus of analysis (see Irwin, 2004, for some caveats), eye movements provide an unobtrusive, sensitive, real-time behavioral index of ongoing visual and cognitive processing."

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