1,721,146 research outputs found
Visual encoding and age-related deficits in object location memory: Evidence from eye movements
No full textWith age, object-location memory performance has been shown to reduce, and older adults recall fewer object locations than younger adults. However, to date, no research has investigated the role of eye movements during encoding of scenes in relation to memory for object-location information. Furthermore, there has been no investigation of whether differences in encoding behaviour with age relate to subsequent memory recall. Using eye-tracking methodology, we aim to conduct three experiments to explore how eye movements during scene inspection change in relation to age, and in relation to recall performance. Specifically, we will systematically explore the influence of encoding instruction, object-distractor similarity and the influence of attentional cueing at encoding on patterns of eye movements and object-location memory performance in younger and older adults. We will also assess the extent to which object-location memory is poorer than either object memory or location memory, and whether these effects are disproportionately larger in older compared to younger adults. From our findings, we aim to provide a clear theoretical account of the relationship between encoding processes associated with scene perception, the cognitive processes underpinning object-location memory, and the extent to which age-related differences in encoding processes are associated with differential age-related decline.</span
Evidence for a reduction of the rightward extent of the perceptual span when reading dynamic horizontally scrolling text
Full text linkThe dynamic horizontally scrolling text format produces a directional conflict in the allocation of attention for reading, with a necessity to track each word leftwards (in the direction of movement) concurrently with normal rightward shifts made to progress through the text (in left-to-right orthographies such as English). The gaze-contingent window paradigm was used to compare the extent of the perceptual span in reading of scrolling and static sentences. Across two experiments, this investigation confirmed that the allocation of attentional resources to the right of fixation was compressed with scrolling text. There was no evidence for a reversal of the direction of asymmetry or a confounding shift of landing position
Rayner's 1979 paper: a brief summary and evaluation
Full text linkRayner (1979) established the Preferred Viewing Location (PVL) for reading fixations: typically, readers fixate at a location slightly left of word centre. Despite its simple elegance, the design of figure 2 of this citation classic has not become a standard for illustrating this phenomenon. We like to pay tribute to this core result (and its visualisation) with a cross-language validation of the PVL. We also extend our analysis to include PVLs of forward and backward refixations and use the new results to qualify proposals of refixation pre-programming
Lexical processing in children and adults during word copying.
No full textCopying text may seem trivial, but the task itself is psychologically complex. It involves a series of sequential visual and cognitive processes, which must be co-ordinated; these include visual encoding, mental representation and written production. To investigate the time course of word processing during copying, we recorded eye movements of adults and children as they hand-copied isolated words presented on a classroom board. Longer and lower frequency words extended adults' encoding durations, suggesting whole word encoding. Only children's short word encoding was extended by lower frequency. Though children spent more time encoding long words compared to short words, gaze durations for long words were extended similarly for high- and low-frequency words. This suggested that for long words children used partial word representations and encoded multiple sublexical units rather than single whole words. Piecemeal word representation underpinned copying longer words in children, but reliance on partial word representations was not shown in adult reader
Foveal processing difficulty does not modulate non-foveal orthographic influences on fixation positions
No full textTwo experiments show that eye fixations land nearer to the beginning of misspelled than correctly spelled beginning words during sentence reading. The effect holds regardless of whether the previous word is easy (high frequency) or difficult (low frequency) to process. In Experiment 1, the misspelled words were directly fixated. In Experiment 2, a saccade contingent change technique was used such that the words were always correctly spelled once they were fixated. The results show that non-foveal orthography influences where words are first fixated regardless of foveal processing load
Orthographic familiarity influences initial eye fixation positions in reading
No full textAn important issue in the understanding of eye movements in reading is what kind of nonfoveal information can influence where we move our eyes. In Experiment 1, first fixation landing positions were nearer the beginning of misspelled words. Experiment 2 showed that the informativeness of word beginnings does not influence where words are first fixated. In both experiments, refixations were more likely to be to the left of the initial fixation position if the words were misspelled. Also, there was no influence of spelling on prior fixation durations or refixation probabilities, that is, there was no evidence for parafoveal-on-foveal effects. The results show that the orthographic familiarity, but not informativeness, of word initial letter sequences influences where words are first fixated
Time-course and specificity of attentional bias in individuals with chronic headache: a discussion of the preliminary findings of two eye-tracking experiments
No full textReading sentences of uniform word length II: very rapid adaptation of the preferred saccade length
Full text linkIn the current study we investigated whether readers adjust their preferred saccade length (PSL) during reading on a trial-by-trial basis. The PSL refers to the distance between a saccade launch site and saccade target (i.e., the word center during reading) when participants neither undershoot nor overshoot this target (McConkie, Kerr, Reddix, & Zola, 1988). The tendency for saccades longer or shorter than the PSL to under or overshoot their target is referred to as the range error. Recent research by Cutter, Drieghe, and Liversedge (2017) has shown that the PSL changes to be shorter when readers are presented with thirty consecutive sentences exclusively made of three letter words, and longer when presented with thirty consecutive sentences exclusively made of five letter words. We replicated and extended this work by this time presenting participants with these uniform sentences in an unblocked design. We found that adaptation still occurred across different sentence types despite participants only having one trial to adapt. Our analyses suggested that this effect was driven by the length of the words readers were making saccades away from, rather than the length of the words in the rest of the sentence. We propose an account of the range error in which readers use parafoveal word length information to estimate the length of a saccade between the centre of two parafoveal words (termed the Centre-Based Saccade Length) prior to landing on the first of these words
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