TY  - JOUR
A1  - von der Malsburg, Titus Raban
A1  - Kliegl, Reinhold
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
T1  - Determinants of Scanpath Regularity in Reading
JF  - Cognitive science : a multidisciplinary journal of anthropology, artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology ; journal of the Cognitive Science Society
N2  - Scanpaths have played an important role in classic research on reading behavior. Nevertheless, they have largely been neglected in later research perhaps due to a lack of suitable analytical tools. Recently, von der Malsburg and Vasishth (2011) proposed a new measure for quantifying differences between scanpaths and demonstrated that this measure can recover effects that were missed with the traditional eyetracking measures. However, the sentences used in that study were difficult to process and scanpath effects accordingly strong. The purpose of the present study was to test the validity, sensitivity, and scope of applicability of the scanpath measure, using simple sentences that are typically read from left to right. We derived predictions for the regularity of scanpaths from the literature on oculomotor control, sentence processing, and cognitive aging and tested these predictions using the scanpath measure and a large database of eye movements. All predictions were confirmed: Sentences with short words and syntactically more difficult sentences elicited more irregular scanpaths. Also, older readers produced more irregular scanpaths than younger readers. In addition, we found an effect that was not reported earlier: Syntax had a smaller influence on the eye movements of older readers than on those of young readers. We discuss this interaction of syntactic parsing cost with age in terms of shifts in processing strategies and a decline of executive control as readers age. Overall, our results demonstrate the validity and sensitivity of the scanpath measure and thus establish it as a productive and versatile tool for reading research.
KW  - Eye movements
KW  - Reading
KW  - Scanpaths
KW  - Language understanding
KW  - Oculo-motor control
KW  - Individual differences
KW  - Aging
KW  - Development
Y1  - 2015
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12208
SN  - 0364-0213
SN  - 1551-6709
VL  - 39
IS  - 7
SP  - 1675
EP  - 1703
PB  - Wiley-Blackwell
CY  - Hoboken
ER  -