Refine
Has Fulltext
- no (2)
Year of publication
- 2013 (2) (remove)
Document Type
- Article (2)
Language
- English (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (2)
Keywords
- Attention (1)
- Disengagement (1)
- Engagement (1)
- Load (1)
- Orienting (1)
- Reading (1)
- Time course (1)
- Word frequency (1)
Institute
- Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften (2) (remove)
We examined how the frequency of the fixated word influences the spatiotemporal distribution of covert attention during reading. Participants discriminated gaze-contingent probes that occurred with different spatial and temporal offsets from randomly chosen fixation points during reading. We found that attention was initially focused at fixation and that subsequent defocusing was slower when the fixated word was lower in frequency. Later in a fixation, attention oriented more towards the next saccadic target for high- than for low-frequency words. These results constitute the first report of the time course of the effect of load on attentional engagement and orienting in reading. They are discussed in the context of serial and parallel models of reading.
What features of a poem make it captivating, and which cognitive mechanisms are sensitive to these features? We addressed these questions experimentally by measuring pupillary responses of 40 participants who listened to a series of Limericks. The Limericks ended with either a semantic, syntactic, rhyme or metric violation. Compared to a control condition without violations, only the rhyme violation condition induced a reliable pupillary response. An anomaly-rating study on the same stimuli showed that all violations were reliably detectable relative to the control condition, but the anomaly induced by rhyme violations was perceived as most severe. Together, our data suggest that rhyme violations in Limericks may induce an emotional response beyond mere anomaly detection.