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Our previous research highlighted a systematic bias in a spatial memory task, with participants correctly detecting object movements in the same direction as the perspective shift, whilst misjudging the direction of object movements if those were in the opposite direction to the perspective shift. The aim of the current study was to investigate if the introduction of perspective shifts results in systematic biases in object location estimations. To do so, we asked participants to encode the position of an object in a virtual room and to then estimate the object’s position following a perspective shift. In addition, by manipulating memory load (perception and memory condition) we investigated if the bias in object position estimates results from systematic distortions introduced in spatial memory. Overall, our results show that participants make systematic errors in estimating object positions in the same direction as the perspective shift. This bias was present in both the memory and the perception condition. We propose that the systematic bias in the same direction as the perspective shift is driven by difficulties in understanding the perspective shifts that may lead participants to use an egocentric representation of object positions as an anchor when estimating the object location following a perspective shift, thereby giving rise to a systematic shift in errors in the same direction as the perspective shift.

In the current study, we investigated whether the introduction of perspective shifts in a spatial memory task results in systematic biases in object location estimations. To do so, we asked participants to first encode the position of an object in a virtual room and then to report its position from memory or perception following a perspective shift. Overall, our results showed that participants made systematic errors in estimating object positions in the same direction as the perspective shift. Notably, this bias was present in both memory and perception conditions. We propose that the observed systematic bias was driven by difficulties in understanding the perspective shifts that led participants to use an egocentric representation of object positions as an anchor when estimating the object location following a perspective shift.

We used a display change detection paradigm (Slattery, Angele, & Rayner Human Perception and Performance, 37, 1924–1938 2011) to investigate whether display change detection uses orthographic regularity and whether detection is affected by the processing difficulty of the word preceding the boundary that triggers the display change. Subjects were significantly more sensitive to display changes when the change was from a nonwordlike preview than when the change was from a wordlike preview, but the preview benefit effect on the target word was not affected by whether the preview was wordlike or nonwordlike. Additionally, we did not find any influence of preboundary word frequency on display change detection performance. Our results suggest that display change detection and lexical processing do not use the same cognitive mechanisms. We propose that parafoveal processing takes place in two stages: an early, orthography-based, preattentional stage, and a late, attention-dependent lexical access stage.

Purpose: Children progress from making grapheme–phoneme connections to making grapho-syllabic connections before whole-word connections during reading development (Ehri, 2005a). More is known about the development of grapheme–phoneme connections than is known about grapho-syllabic connections. Therefore, we explored the trajectory of syllable use in English developing readers during oral reading. Method: Fifty-one English-speaking children (mean age: 8.9 years, 55% females, 88% monolinguals) in year groups three, four, and five read aloud sentences with an embedded target word, while their eye movements and voices were recorded. The targets contained six letters and were either one or two syllables. Result: Children in grade five had shorter gaze duration, shorter articulation duration, and larger spatial eye-voice span (EVS) than children in grade four. Children in grades three and four did not significantly differ on these measures. A syllable number effect was found for gaze duration but not for articulation duration and spatial EVS. Interestingly, one-syllable words took longer to process compared to two-syllable words, suggesting that more syllables may not always signify greater processing difficulty. Conclusion: Overall, children are sensitive to sublexical reading units; however, due to sample and stimuli limitations, these findings should be interpreted with caution and further research conducted.

When displaying text on a page or a screen, only a finite number of characters can be presented on a single line. If the text exceeds that finite value, then text wrapping occurs. Often this process results in longer, more difficult to process words being positioned at the start of a line. We conducted an eye movement study to examine how this artefact of text wrapping affects passage reading. This allowed us to answer the question: should word difficulty be used when determining line breaks? Thirty-nine participants read 20 passages where low-frequency target words were either line-initial or line-final. There was no statistically reliable effect of our manipulation on passage reading time or comprehension despite several effects at a local level. Regarding our primary research question, the evidence suggests that word difficulty may not need to be accounted for when determining line breaks and assigning words to new lines.

Recent research on return-sweep saccades has improved our understanding of eye movements when reading paragraphs. However, these saccades, which take our gaze from the end of one line to the start of the next line, have been studied only within the context of silent reading. Articulatory demands and the coordination of the eye–voice span (EVS) at line boundaries suggest that the execution of this saccade may be diferent in oral reading. We compared launch and landing positions of return-sweeps, corrective saccade probability and fxations adjacent to return-sweeps in skilled adult readers while reading paragraphs aloud and silently. Compared to silent reading, return-sweeps were launched from closer to the end of the line and landed closer to the start of the next line when reading aloud. The probability of making a corrective saccade was higher for oral reading than silent reading. These indicate that oral reading may compel readers to rely more on foveal processing at the expense of parafoveal processing. We found an interaction between reading modality and fxation type on fxation durations. The reading modality efect (i.e., increased fxation durations in oral compared to silent reading) was greater for accurate line-initial fxations and marginally greater for line-fnal fxations compared to intra-line fxations. This suggests that readers may use the fxations adjacent to return-sweeps as natural pause locations to modulate the EVS.

The aim of the current study was to develop a novel task that allows for the quick assessment of spatial memory precision with minimal technical and training requirements. In this task, participants memorized the position of an object in a virtual room and then judged from a different perspective, whether the object has moved to the left or to the right. Results revealed that participants exhibited a systematic bias in their responses that we termed the reversed congruency effect. Specifically, they performed worse when the camera and the object moved in the same direction than when they moved in opposite directions. Notably, participants responded correctly in almost 100% of the incongruent trials, regardless of the distance by which the object was displaced. In Experiment 2, we showed that this effect cannot be explained by the movement of the object on the screen, but that it relates to the perspective shift and the movement of the object in the virtual world. We also showed that the presence of additional objects in the environment reduces the reversed congruency effect such that it no longer predicts performance. In Experiment 3, we showed that the reversed congruency effect is greater in older adults, suggesting that the quality of spatial memory and perspective-taking abilities are critical. Overall, our results suggest that this effect is driven by difficulties in the precise encoding of object locations in the environment and in understanding how perspective shifts affect the projected positions of the objects in the two-dimensional image.

Return-sweeps take a reader’s fixation from the end of one line to the start of the next. Return-sweeps frequently undershoot their target and are followed by a corrective saccade towards the left margin. The pauses prior to correctives saccades are typically considered to be uninvolved in linguistic processing. However, recent findings indicate that these undersweep-fixations influence skilled adult reader’s subsequent reading pass across the line and provide preview of line-initial words. This research examined these effects in children. First, a children’s reading corpus analysis revealed that words receiving an undersweep-fixation were more likely skipped and received shorter gaze durations during a subsequent pass. Second, a novel eye movement experiment which directly compared adults’ and children’s eye movements indicated that, during an undersweep-fixation, readers very briefly allocate their attention to the fixated word—as indicated by inhibition of return effects during a subsequent pass—prior to deploying attention towards the line-initial word. We argue that, prior to the redeployment of attention, readers extract information at the point of fixation that facilitates later encoding and saccade targeting. Given similar patterns of results for adults and children, we conclude that the mechanisms controlling for oculomotor coordination and attention necessary for reading across line boundaries are established from a very early point in reading development.

In the current study, we conducted two eye-tracking reading experiments to explore whether sentence context can influence neighbor effects in word recognition during Chinese reading. Chinese readers read sentences in which the targets’ orthographic neighbors were either plausible or implausible with the pre-target context. The results revealed that the neighbor effect was influenced by context: the context in the biased condition (where only targets but not neighbors can fit in the pre-target context) evoked a significantly weaker inhibitory neighbor effect than in the neutral condition (where both targets and neighbors can fit in the pre-target context). These results indicate that contextual information can be used to modulate neighbor effects during on-line sentence reading in Chinese.

During reading, eye movement patterns differ between children and adults. Children make more fixations that are longer in duration and make shorter saccades. Return-sweeps are saccadic eye movements that move a reader’s fixation to a new line of text. Return-sweeps move fixation further than intra-line saccades and often undershoot their target. This necessitates a corrective saccade to bring fixation closer to the start of the line. There have been few empirical investigations of return-sweep saccades in adults, and even fewer in children. In the present study, we examined return-sweeps of 47 adults and 48 children who read identical multiline texts. We found that children launch their return-sweeps closer to the end of the line and target a position closer to the left margin. Therefore, children fixate more extreme positions on the screen when reading for comprehension. Furthermore, children required a corrective saccade following a return-sweep more often than adults. Analysis of the duration of the fixation preceding the corrective saccade indicated that children are as efficient as adults at responding to retinal feedback following a saccade. Rather than consider differences in adult’s and children’s return-sweep behaviour an artefact of oculomotor control, we believe that these differences represent adult’s ability to utilise parafoveal processing to encode text at extreme positions.

In the research reported here, we investigated how phonological processing in the lexical decision task is influenced by individual differences in the reading and spelling abilities of participants. We used phonological neighborhood spread as a measure of phonological processing. Spread refers to the number of phoneme positions in a word that can be changed to form a phonological neighbor. Replicating previous research, we found that words forming neighbors across three positions (P3) were recognized more rapidly than those forming neighbors across only two positions (P2). Importantly, we found that this spread effect interacted with spelling ability. The difference between P3 and P2 was largest when spelling recognition was high and spelling production low. These opposing effects of spelling ability are explained in terms of a language system that consists of separate orthographic systems for reading and spelling. Although these two orthographic systems are separate, they share information through a shared response buffer (Jones & Rawson, 2016). Within this framework, it is argued that lexical decisions are made once the information in the response buffer reaches threshold and that time to reach this threshold is influenced by two sources. One is the quality of the orthographic connections in the reading system and is measured by spelling recognition. The other is the quality of the orthographic connections in the spelling system and is measured by spelling production.

During reading, binocular coordination ensures that a unified perceptual representation of the text is maintained across eye movements. However, slight vergence errors exist. The magnitude of disparity at fixation onset is related to the length of the preceding saccade. Return-sweeps are saccadic eye movements that span a line of text and direct gaze from the end of one line to the start of the next. As these eye movements travel much farther than intraline saccades, increased binocular disparity following a return-sweep is likely. Indeed, increased disparity has been a proposed explanation for longer line-initial fixations. Thus, we sought to address the following questions: Is binocular disparity larger following a return-sweep saccade than it is following an intraline saccade, and is the duration of a line-initial fixation related to binocular disparity and coordination processes? To examine these questions, we recorded binocular eye movements as participants read multiline texts. We report that, following return-sweeps, the magnitude of disparity at fixation onset is increased. However, this increased magnitude of disparity is unrelated to the duration of line-initial fixations. We argue that longer line-initial fixations result from a lack of parafoveal preview for words at the start of the line.

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 two 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 utilized 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.

Despite the large number of eye movement studies conducted over the past 30+ years, relatively few have examined the influence that font characteristics have on reading. However, there has been renewed interest in one particular font characteristic, letter spacing, which has both theoretical (visual word recognition) and applied (font design) importance. Recently published results that letter spacing has a bigger impact on the reading performance of dyslexic children have perhaps garnered the most attention (Zorzi et al. 2012). Unfortunately, the effects of increased inter-letter spacing have been mixed with some authors reporting facilitation and others reporting inhibition (van den Boer & Hakvoort, 2015). We present findings from three experiments designed to resolve the seemingly inconsistent letter-spacing effects and provide clarity to researchers and font designers and researchers. The results indicate that the direction of spacing effects depend on the size of the ‘default’ spacing chosen by font developers. Experiment 3, found that inter-letter spacing interacts with inter-word spacing, as the required space between words depends on the amount of space used between letters. Inter-word spacing also interacted with word type as the inhibition seen with smaller inter-word spacing was evident with nouns and verbs but not with function words.

The study of reading has been greatly advanced in the past 40 years by the examination of eye movements recorded during the reading process. Despite the advances made by reading researchers using eye movement recording as a methodology, this research has resulted in relatively few advances in the way text is displayed to readers. That is not to say that textual displays have not undergone significant improvements over this time. Only that the improvements were not driven by eye movement research. This disconnect is of particular interest given the applicability that eye movements offer for understanding all aspects of the read process. The possible reasons for this disconnect between psycholinguistic research and font design will be discussed. Additionally, current psycholinguistic research trends that overlap with potential font design issues will be explored during a review of the eye movement findings.

Recent work has suggested that readers 19 initial and incorrect interpretation of temporarily ambiguous ("garden path") sentences (e.g., Christianson, Hollingworth, Halliwell, & Ferreira, 2001) sometimes lingers even after attempts at reanalysis. These lingering effects have been attributed to incomplete reanalysis. In two eye tracking experiments, we distinguish between two types of incompleteness: the language comprehension system might not build a faithful syntactic structure, or it might not fully erase the structure built during an initial misparse. The first experiment used reflexive binding and the Gender Mismatch paradigm to show that a complete and faithful structure is built following processing of the garden-path. The second experiment used two-sentence texts to examine the extent to which the garden-path meaning from the first sentence interferes with reading of the second. Together, the results indicate that misinterpretation effects are attributable not to failure in building a proper structure, but rather to failure in cleaning up all remnants of earlier attempts to build that syntactic representation.

Two eye movement experiments investigated intra-word spacing (the space between letters within words) and inter-word spacing (the space between words) to explore the influence these variables have on eye movement control during reading. Both variables are important factors in determining the optimal use of space in a line of text, and fonts differ widely in how they employ these spaces. Prior research suggests that the proximity of flanking letters influences the identification of a central letter via lateral inhibition or crowding. If so decrements in intra-word spacing may produce inhibition in word processing. Still other research suggests that increases in intra-word spacing can disrupt the integrity of word units. In English, inter-word spacing has a large influence on word segmentation and is important for saccade target selection. The results indicate interplay between intra and inter word spacing which influence a font’s readability. Additionally, these studies highlight the importance of word segmentation processes and have implications for the nature of lexical processing (serial vs. parallel).

It is well established that fixation durations during reading vary with processing difficulty, but there are different views on how oculomotor control, visual perception, shifts of attention, and lexical (and higher cognitive) processing are coordinated. Evidence for a one-to-one translation of input delay into saccadic latency would provide a much needed constraint for current theoretical proposals. Here, we tested predictions of such a direct-control perspective using the stimulus-onset delay (SOD) paradigm. Words in sentences were initially masked and, upon fixation, were individually unmasked with a delay (0-ms, 33-ms, 66-ms, 99-ms SODs). In Experiment 1, SODs were constant for all words in a sentence; in Experiment 2, SODs were manipulated on target words, while non-targets were unmasked without delay. In accordance with predictions of direct control, non-zero SODs entailed equivalent increases in fixation durations in both experiments. Yet, a population of short fixations pointed to rapid saccades as a consequence of low-level information at non-optimal viewing positions rather than of lexical processing. Implications of these results for theoretical accounts of oculomotor control are discussed.

An important question in research on eye movements in reading is whether word frequency and word predictability have additive or interactive effects on fixation durations. A fair number of studies have reported only additive effects of the frequency and predictability of a target word on reading times on that word, failing to show significant interactions. Recently, however, Hand, Miellet, O'Donnell, and Sereno (see record 2010-19099-001) reported interactive effects in a study that included the distance of the prior fixation from the target word (launch site). They reported that when the saccade into the target word was launched from very near to the word (within 3 characters), the predictability effect was larger for low frequency words, but when the saccade was launched from a medium distance (4-6 characters from the word) the predictability effect was larger for high frequency words. Hand et al. argued for the importance of including launch site in analyses of target word fixation durations. Here we describe several problems with Hand et al.'s use of analyses of variance in which launch site is divided into distinct ordinal levels. We describe a more appropriate way to analyze such data-linear mixed-effect models-and we use this method to show that launch site does not modulate the interaction between frequency and predictability in two other data sets.

Numerous studies have demonstrated effects of word frequency on eye movements during reading, but the precise timing of this influence has remained unclear. The fast priming paradigm (Sereno & Rayner, 1992) was previously used to study influences of related versus unrelated primes on the target word. Here, we used this procedure to investigate whether the frequency of the prime word has a direct influence on eye movements during reading when the prime-target relation is not manipulated. We found that with average prime intervals of 32 ms readers made longer single fixation durations on the target word in the low than in the high frequency prime condition. Distributional analyses demonstrated that the effect of prime frequency on single fixation durations occurred very early, supporting theories of immediate cognitive control of eye movements. Finding prime frequency effects only 207 ms after visibility of the prime and for prime durations of 32 ms yields new time constraints for cognitive processes controlling eye movements during reading. Our variant of the fast priming paradigm provides a new approach to test early influences of word processing on eye movement control during reading.

Recent evidence suggests that, compared with hearing people, deaf people have enhanced visual attention to simple stimuli viewed in the parafovea and periphery. Although a large part of reading involves processing the fixated words in foveal vision, readers also utilize information in parafoveal vision to preprocess upcoming words and decide where to look next. In the study reported here, we investigated whether auditory deprivation affects low-level visual processing during reading by comparing the perceptual span of deaf signers who were skilled and less-skilled readers with the perceptual span of skilled hearing readers. Compared with hearing readers, the two groups of deaf readers had a larger perceptual span than would be expected given their reading ability. These results provide the first evidence that deaf readers' enhanced attentional allocation to the parafovea is used during complex cognitive tasks, such as reading.

We introduce a novel Dual Input Stream Transformer (DIST) for the challenging problem of assigning fixation points from eye-tracking data collected during passage reading to the line of text that the reader was actually focused on. This post-processing step is crucial for analysis of the reading data due to the presence of noise in the form of vertical drift. We evaluate DIST against eleven classical approaches on a comprehensive suite of nine diverse datasets. We demonstrate that combining multiple instances of the DIST model in an ensemble achieves high accuracy across all datasets. Further combining the DIST ensemble with the best classical approach yields an average accuracy of 98.17 %. Our approach presents a significant step towards addressing the bottleneck of manual line assignment in reading research. Through extensive analysis and ablation studies, we identify key factors that contribute to DIST's success, including the incorporation of line overlap features and the use of a second input stream. Via rigorous evaluation, we demonstrate that DIST is robust to various experimental setups, making it a safe first choice for practitioners in the field.