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In their article, "Time Course of Linguistic Information Extraction from Consecutive Words During Eye Fixations in Reading," A. W. Inhoff, B. M. Eiter, and R. Radach (see EJ735287) reported the results of two experiments that they claimed were problematic for serial attention models of eye movements in reading (such as the E-Z Reader model). In this reply, the authors demonstrate through argumentation and simulations that their data pose no serious problem for the E-Z Reader model or serial attention models in general.

The general question examined by this study was whether the tendency of subjects to ignore the known score in giving the best guess for a sample mean was due to a descriptive heuristic such as representativeness or to a mechanistic one such as active balancing. Two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, subjects estimated: (1) the mean of a random sample of ten scores consisting of nine unknown scores and a known score that was divergent from the population mean; and (2) the mean of the nine unknown scores. The modal answer (about 40% of the responses) for both sample means was the population mean. The results extend the work of Tversky and Kahneman (1971) by demonstrating that subjects hold a passive, descriptive view of random sampling rather than an active balancing model. This result was explored further in in-depth interviews (Experiment 2), wherein subjects solved the problem while explaining their reasoning. The interview data replicated Experiment 1 and further showed (a) that subjects' solutions were fairly stable--when presented with alternative solutions including the correct one, few subjects changed their answers; (b) little evidence of a balancing mechanism; and (c) that acceptance of both means as 400 is largely a result of the perceived unpredictability of "random samples." (Author/AA)