When your mind skips what your eyes fixate
- The phenomenon of forced fixations suggests that readers sometimes fixate a word (due to oculomotor constraints) even though they intended to skip it (due to parafoveal cognitive-linguistic processing). We investigate whether this leads readers to look directly at a word but not pay attention to it. We used a gaze-contingent boundary paradigm to dissociate parafoveal and foveal information (e.g., the word phone changed to scarf once the reader's eyes moved to it) and asked questions about the sentence to determine which one the reader encoded. When the word was skipped or fixated only briefly (i.e., up to 100 ms) readers were more likely to report reading the parafoveal than the fixated word, suggesting that there are cases in which readers look directly at a word but their minds ignore it, leading to the illusion of reading something they did not fixate.
Author details: | Elizabeth Roye SchotterORCiDGND, Mallorie Leinenger, Titus Raban von der MalsburgORCiDGND |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-017-1356-y |
ISSN: | 1069-9384 |
ISSN: | 1531-5320 |
Pubmed ID: | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28766185 |
Title of parent work (English): | Psychonomic bulletin & review : a journal of the Psychonomic Society |
Subtitle (English): | how forced fixations lead to comprehension illusions in reading |
Publisher: | Springer |
Place of publishing: | New York |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2017/08/01 |
Publication year: | 2017 |
Release date: | 2021/09/21 |
Tag: | Eye movements and reading; Text comprehension; Word recognition |
Volume: | 25 |
Issue: | 5 |
Number of pages: | 7 |
First page: | 1884 |
Last Page: | 1890 |
Funding institution: | Alexander von Humboldt-StiftungAlexander von Humboldt Foundation [Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship]; National Institute of Child Health and Human DevelopmentUnited States Department of Health & Human ServicesNational Institutes of Health (NIH) - USANIH Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD) [HD065829] |
Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
DDC classification: | 4 Sprache / 41 Linguistik / 410 Linguistik |
Peer review: | Referiert |
Publishing method: | Open Access / Bronze Open-Access |