Reading Disappearing Text

2003 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 385-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Rayner ◽  
Simon P. Liversedge ◽  
Sarah J. White ◽  
Dorine Vergilino-Perez
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movement ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
High Frequency ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Movement Control ◽  
Oculomotor Control ◽  
Frequency Effect ◽  
Normal Reading ◽  
Control Models

Participants read sentences containing high- or low-frequency target words under normal reading conditions or disappearing-text conditions (in which the word that was fixated disappeared after 60 ms). Even though the fixated word had disappeared after 60 ms, there was still a robust frequency effect wherein readers fixated longer on low-frequency words than on high-frequency words. Thus, the results are consistent with cognitive-control models of eye movement control and inconsistent with visual/oculomotor-control models. Although the uptake of visual information is clearly important for reading, it is the cognitive processes associated with understanding the fixated words that drive the eyes through the text.

E-Z Reader 7 provides a platform for explaining how low- and high-level linguistic processes influence eye movements

2003 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 498-499 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary E. Raney
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Eye Movement ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Movement Control ◽  
Reading Processes ◽  
Eye Movement Control ◽  
Normal Reading ◽  
High Level

E-Z Reader 7 is a processing model of eye-movement control. One constraint imposed on the model is that high-level cognitive processes do not influence eye movements unless normal reading processes are disturbed. I suggest that this constraint is unnecessary, and that the model provides a sensible architecture for explaining how both low- and high-level processes influence eye movements.

scholarly journals Refixation control in free viewing: a specialized mechanism divulged by eye-movement-related brain activity

2018 ◽  
Vol 120 (5) ◽  
pp. 2311-2324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrey R. Nikolaev ◽  
Radha Nila Meghanathan ◽  
Cees van Leeuwen
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movement ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Direct Evidence ◽  
Search Task ◽  
Visual Search Task ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Movement Control ◽  
Planning Stage ◽  
Eye Fixations ◽  
Free Viewing

In free viewing, the eyes return to previously visited locations rather frequently, even though the attentional and memory-related processes controlling eye-movement show a strong antirefixation bias. To overcome this bias, a special refixation triggering mechanism may have to be recruited. We probed the neural evidence for such a mechanism by combining eye tracking with EEG recording. A distinctive signal associated with refixation planning was observed in the EEG during the presaccadic interval: the presaccadic potential was reduced in amplitude before a refixation compared with normal fixations. The result offers direct evidence for a special refixation mechanism that operates in the saccade planning stage of eye movement control. Once the eyes have landed on the revisited location, acquisition of visual information proceeds indistinguishably from ordinary fixations. NEW & NOTEWORTHY A substantial proportion of eye fixations in human natural viewing behavior are revisits of recently visited locations, i.e., refixations. Our recently developed methods enabled us to study refixations in a free viewing visual search task, using combined eye movement and EEG recording. We identified in the EEG a distinctive refixation-related signal, signifying a control mechanism specific to refixations as opposed to ordinary eye fixations.

Nonword repetition and levels of abstraction in phonological knowledge

2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 577-581 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Munson
Keyword(s):  
High Frequency ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Nonword Repetition ◽  
Chronological Age ◽  
Frequency Effect ◽  
Vocabulary Size ◽  
Levels Of Abstraction ◽  
Opposite Pattern ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Restriction Of Range

Susan Gathercole's Keynote Article (2006) is an impressive summary of the literature on nonword repetition and its relationship to word learning and vocabulary size. When considering research by Mary Beckman, Jan Edwards, and myself, Gathercole speculates that our finding of a stronger relationship between vocabulary measures and repetition accuracy for low-frequency sequences than for high-frequency sequences is due to differences in the range of the two measures. In our work on diphone repetition (e.g., Edwards, Beckman, & Munson, 2004; Munson, Edwards, & Beckman, 2005) we tried to increase the range in our dependent measures by coding errors on a finer grained scale than simple correct/incorrect scoring would allow. Moreover, restriction of range does not appear to be the driving factor in the relationship between vocabulary size and the difference between high- and low-frequency sequence repetition accuracy (what we call the frequency effect) in at least one of our studies (Munson et al., 2005). When the children with the 50 lowest mean accuracy scores for high-frequency sequences were examined, vocabulary size accounted for 10.5% of the variance in the frequency effect beyond what was accounted for by chronological age. When the 50 children with the highest mean accuracy scores for high-frequency sequences were examined (a group in which the range of high-frequency accuracy scores was more compressed, arguably reflecting ceiling effects), an estimate of vocabulary size accounted for only 6.9% of the frequency effect beyond chronological age. The associated β coefficient was significant only at the α<0.08 level. This is the opposite pattern than Gathercole's argument would predict.

Effects of Response Range in Frequency Judgments of Common versus Uncommon Events

1996 ◽  
Vol 82 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1371-1376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimihiko Yamagishi
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
High Frequency ◽  
Narrow Range ◽  
Frequency Estimation ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Social Facts ◽  
Frequency Judgments ◽  
Response Range ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Wide Condition

Frequency estimation of social facts was compared between two methods of response elicitation. In the “narrow range” method, respondents answered questions like: “Out of 100 instances, how many instances belong to category X?”. In the “wide range” method, the same question was asked regarding “Out of 10,000.” A previous study in 1994 showed that judged frequencies were proportionally greater in the narrow condition than in the wide condition when subjects estimated the occurrence of low-frequency events. These results were interpreted to reflect cognitive processes of anchoring, wherein judged frequencies he close to small numbers within particular response ranges. The current work extends this argument to high-frequency events. In such cases, judgments about high-frequency events would be reached by similar cognitive processes operating toward the opposite direction. Hence, I predicted that judged frequencies for high-frequency events would be proportionally greater in the wide than in the narrow condition. Results were mostly consistent with these predictions. The relation to previous research is discussed.

scholarly journals Reading sentences of words with rotated letters: An eye movement study

2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (7) ◽  
pp. 1790-1804 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hazel I Blythe ◽  
Barbara J Juhasz ◽  
Lee W Tbaily ◽  
Keith Rayner ◽  
Simon P Liversedge
Keyword(s):  
Target Word ◽  
Eye Movement ◽  
Word Identification ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Movement Control ◽  
Visual Presentation ◽  
Systematic Change ◽  
Relative Contribution ◽  
Total Fixation ◽  
Movement Study

Participants’ eye movements were measured as they read sentences in which individual letters within words were rotated. Both the consistency of direction and the magnitude of rotation were manipulated (letters rotated all in the same direction, or alternately clockwise and anti-clockwise, by 30° or 60°). Each sentence included a target word that was manipulated for frequency of occurrence. Our objectives were threefold: To quantify how change in the visual presentation of individual letters disrupted word identification, and whether disruption was consistent with systematic change in visual presentation; to determine whether inconsistent letter transformation caused more disruption than consistent letter transformation; and to determine whether such effects were comparable for words that were high and low frequency to explore the extent to which they were visually or linguistically mediated. We found that disruption to reading was greater as the magnitude of letter rotation increased, although even small rotations affected processing. The data also showed that alternating letter rotations were significantly more disruptive than consistent rotations; this result is consistent with models of lexical identification in which encoding occurs over units of more than one adjacent letter. These rotation manipulations also showed significant interactions with word frequency on the target word: Gaze durations and total fixation duration times increased disproportionately for low-frequency words when they were presented at more extreme rotations. These data provide a first step towards quantifying the relative contribution of the spatial relationships between individual letters to word recognition and eye movement control in reading.

Distinct Subsystems for the Parafoveal Processing of Spatial and Linguistic Information during Eye Fixations in Reading

2003 ◽  
Vol 56 (5) ◽  
pp. 803-827 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albrecht W. Inhoff ◽  
Ralph Radach ◽  
Brianna M. Eiter ◽  
Barbara Juhasz
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movement ◽  
High Frequency ◽  
Word Length ◽  
Spatial Information ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Visual Object ◽  
Additive Effects ◽  
Linguistic Information ◽  
Object Selection ◽  
Eye Fixations

Two experiments examined readers’ use of parafoveally obtained word length information for word recognition. Both experiments manipulated the length (number of constituent characters) of a parafoveally previewed target word so that it was either accurately or inaccurately specified. In Experiment 1, previews also either revealed or denied useful orthographic information. In Experiment 2, parafoveal targets were either high- or low-frequency words. Eye movement contingent display changes were used to show the intact target upon its fixation. Examination of target viewing duration showed completely additive effects of word length previews and of ortho-graphic previews in Experiment 1, viewing duration being shorter in the accurate-length and the orthographic preview conditions. Experiment 2 showed completely additive effects of word length and word frequency, target viewing being shorter in the accurate-length and the high-frequency conditions. Together these results indicate that functionally distinct subsystems control the use of parafoveally visible spatial and linguistic information in reading. Parafoveally visible spatial information appears to be used for two distinct extralinguistic computations: visual object selection and saccade specification.

Spatial Scale Interactions and Visual-Tracking Performance

Perception ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 26 (8) ◽  
pp. 1047-1058 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard C Hughes ◽  
David M Aronchick ◽  
Michael D Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Frequency ◽  
High Frequency ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
High Spatial Frequency ◽  
Performance Measure ◽  
High Frequency Component ◽  
Stimulus Velocity ◽  
Spatial Frequencies ◽  
Wide Range

It has previously been observed that low spatial frequencies (≤ 1.0 cycles deg−1) tend to dominate high spatial frequencies (≥ 5.0 cycles deg−1) in several types of visual-information-processing tasks. This earlier work employed reaction times as the primary performance measure and the present experiments address the possibility of low-frequency dominance by evaluating visually guided performance of a completely different response system: the control of slow-pursuit eye movements. Slow-pursuit gains (eye velocity/stimulus velocity) were obtained while observers attempted to track the motion of a sine-wave grating. The drifting gratings were presented on three types of background: a uniform background, a background consisting of a stationary grating, or a flickering background. Low-frequency dominance was evident over a wide range of velocities, in that a stationary high-frequency component produced little disruption in the pursuit of a drifting low spatial frequency, but a stationary low frequency interfered substantially with the tracking of a moving high spatial frequency. Pursuit was unaffected by temporal modulation of the background, suggesting that these effects are due to the spatial characteristics of the stationary grating. Similar asymmetries were observed with respect to the stability of fixation: active fixation was less stable in the presence of a drifting low frequency than in the presence of a drifting high frequency.

scholarly journals The rhythm of cognition – Effects of an auditory beat on oculomotor control in reading and sequential scanning

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elke B. Lange ◽  
Aleksandra Pieczykolan ◽  
Hans A. Trukenbrod ◽  
Lynn Huestegge
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movement ◽  
Cognitive Processing ◽  
Movement Control ◽  
Movement Behavior ◽  
Oculomotor Control ◽  
Background Music ◽  
Cognitive Tasks ◽  
Text Reading ◽  
Musical Tempo ◽  
Sequential Scanning

Eye-movement behavior is inherently rhythmic. Even without cognitive input, the eyes never rest, as saccades are generated 3 to 4 times per second. Based on an embodied view of cognition, we asked whether mental processing in visual cognitive tasks is also rhythmic in nature by studying the effects of an external auditory beat (rhythmic background music) on saccade generation in exemplary cognitive tasks (reading and sequential scanning). While in applied settings background music has been demonstrated to impair reading comprehension, the effect of musical tempo on eye-movement control during reading or scanning has not been investigated so far. We implemented a tempo manipulation in four steps as well as a silent baseline condition, while participants completed a text reading or a sequential scanning task that differed from each other in terms of underlying cognitive processing requirements. The results revealed that increased tempo of the musical beat sped up fixations in text reading, while the presence (vs. absence) of the auditory stimulus generally reduced overall reading time. In contrast, sequential scanning was unaffected by the auditory pacemaker. These results were supported by additionally applying Bayesian inference statistics. Our study provides evidence against a cognitive load account (i.e., that spare resources during low-demand sequential scanning allow for enhanced processing of the external beat). Instead, the data suggest an interpretation in favor of a modulation of the oculomotor saccade timer by irrelevant background music in cases involving highly automatized oculomotor control routines (here: in text reading).

A Note on the Masking of Pictures

Perception ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter M Forster
Keyword(s):  
Information Processing ◽  
High Frequency ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Random Noise ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Pattern Mask ◽  
Type B ◽  
General Applicability ◽  
Everyday Objects ◽  
Different Types

An experiment is described in which photographs of everyday objects were masked by frequency-filtered random visual noise. The masking functions obtained were of the same type as those obtained by masking letters and words with random noise or a pattern mask. That is, the high-frequency mask produced a type A function while the low-frequency mask produced a type B function. This result is discussed in terms of the general applicability of models of visual information processing constructed on the basis of experiments with letter or word stimuli. It is suggested that spatial-frequency concepts may usefully be employed to describe the relevant features of different types of mask.

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