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Although eye movements during reading are modulated by cognitive processing demands, they also reflect visual sampling of the input, and possibly preparation of output for speech or the inner voice. By simultaneously recording eye movements and the voice during reading aloud, we obtained an output measure that constrains the length of time spent on cognitive processing. Here we investigate the dynamics of the eye-voice span (EVS), the distance between eye and voice. We show that the EVS is regulated immediately during fixation of a word by either increasing fixation duration or programming a regressive eye movement against the reading direction. EVS size at the beginning of a fixation was positively correlated with the likelihood of regressions and refixations. Regression probability was further increased if the EVS was still large at the end of a fixation: if adjustment of fixation duration did not sufficiently reduce the EVS during a fixation, then a regression rather than a refixation followed with high probability. We further show that the EVS can help understand cognitive influences on fixation duration during reading: in mixed model analyses, the EVS was a stronger predictor of fixation durations than either word frequency or word length. The EVS modulated the influence of several other predictors on single fixation durations (SFDs). For example, word-N frequency effects were larger with a large EVS, especially when word N-1 frequency was low. Finally, a comparison of SFDs during oral and silent reading showed that reading is governed by similar principles in both reading modes, although EVS maintenance and articulatory processing also cause some differences. In summary, the EVS is regulated by adjusting fixation duration and/or by programming a regressive eye movement when the EVS gets too large. Overall, the EVS appears to be directly related to updating of the working memory buffer during reading.
There is a wealth of evidence showing that increasing the distance between an argument and its head leads to more processing effort, namely, locality effects; these are usually associated with constraints in working memory (DLT: Gibson, 2000; activation-based model: Lewis and Vasishth, 2005). In SOV languages, however, the opposite effect has been found: antilocality (see discussion in Levy et al., 2013). Antilocality effects can be explained by the expectation-based approach as proposed by Levy (2008) or by the activation-based model of sentence processing as proposed by Lewis and Vasishth (2005). We report an eye-tracking and a self-paced reading study with sentences in Spanish together with measures of individual differences to examine the distinction between expectation- and memory-based accounts, and within memory-based accounts the further distinction between DLT and the activation-based model. The experiments show that (i) antilocality effects as predicted by the expectation account appear only for high-capacity readers; (ii) increasing dependency length by interposing material that modifies the head of the dependency (the verb) produces stronger facilitation than increasing dependency length with material that does not modify the head; this is in agreement with the activation-based model but not with the expectation account; and (iii) a possible outcome of memory load on low-capacity readers is the increase in regressive saccades (locality effects as predicted by memory-based accounts) or, surprisingly, a speedup in the self-paced reading task; the latter consistent with good-enough parsing (Ferreira et al., 2002). In sum, the study suggests that individual differences in working memory capacity play a role in dependency resolution, and that some of the aspects of dependency resolution can be best explained with the activation-based model together with a prediction component.
Following up on research suggesting an age-related reduction in the rightward extent of the perceptual span during reading (Rayner, Castelhano, & Yang, 2009), we compared old and young adults in an N+2-boundary paradigm in which a nonword preview of word N+2 or word N+2 itself is replaced by the target word once the eyes cross an invisible boundary located after word N. The intermediate word N+1 was always three letters long. Gaze durations on word N+2 were significantly shorter for identical than nonword N+2 preview both for young and for old adults with no significant difference in this preview benefit. Young adults, however, did modulate their gaze duration on word N more strongly than old adults in response to the difficulty of the parafoveal word N+1. Taken together, the results suggest a dissociation of preview benefit and parafoveal-on-foveal effect. Results are discussed in terms of age-related decline in resilience towards distributed processing while simultaneously preserving the ability to integrate parafoveal information into foveal processing. As such, the present results relate to proposals of regulatory compensation strategies older adults use to secure an overall reading speed very similar to that of young adults.
Linear mixed models (LMMs) provide a still underused methodological perspective on combining experimental and individual-differences research. Here we illustrate this approach with two-rectangle cueing in visual attention (Egly et al., 1994). We replicated previous experimental cue-validity effects relating to a spatial shift of attention within an object (spatial effect), to attention switch between objects (object effect), and to the attraction of attention toward the display centroid (attraction effect), also taking into account the design-inherent imbalance of valid and other trials. We simultaneously estimated variance/covariance components of subject-related random effects for these spatial, object, and attraction effects in addition to their mean reaction times (RTs). The spatial effect showed a strong positive correlation with mean RT and a strong negative correlation with the attraction effect. The analysis of individual differences suggests that slow subjects engage attention more strongly at the cued location than fast subjects. We compare this joint LMM analysis of experimental effects and associated subject-related variances and correlations with two frequently used alternative statistical procedures
There has been a substantial increase in the percentage for publications with co-authors located in departments from different countries in 12 major journals of psychology. The results are evidence for a remarkable internationalization of psychological research, starting in the mid 1970s and increasing in rate at the beginning of the 1990s. This growth occurs against a constant number of articles with authors from the same country; it is not due to a concomitant increase in the number of co-authors per article. Thus, international collaboration in psychology is obviously on the rise.
Eye fixation durations during normal reading correlate with processing difficulty but the specific cognitive mechanisms reflected in these measures are not well understood. This study finds support in German readers’ eyefixations for two distinct difficulty metrics: surprisal, which reflects the change in probabilities across syntactic analyses as new words are integrated, and retrieval, which quantifies comprehension difficulty in terms of working memory constraints. We examine the predictions of both metrics using a family of dependency parsers indexed by an upper limit on the number of candidate syntactic analyses they retain at successive words. Surprisal models all fixation measures and regression probability. By contrast, retrieval does not model any measure in serial processing. As more candidate analyses are considered in parallel at each word, retrieval can account for the same measures as surprisal. This pattern suggests an important role for ranked parallelism in theories of sentence comprehension.
Eye movements in reading are sensitive to foveal and parafoveal word features. Whereas the influence of orthographic or phonological parafoveal information on gaze control is undisputed, there has been no reliable evidence for early parafoveal extraction of semantic information in alphabetic script. Using a novel combination of the gaze-contingent fast-priming and boundary paradigms, we demonstrate semantic preview benefit when a semantically related parafoveal word was available during the initial 125 ms of a fixation on the pre-target word (Experiments 1 and 2). When the target location was made more salient, significant parafoveal semantic priming occurred only at 80 ms (Experiment 3). Finally, with short primes only (20, 40, 60 ms) effects were not significant but numerically in the expected direction for 40 and 60 ms (Experiment 4). In all experiments, fixation durations on the target word increased with prime durations under all conditions. The evidence for extraction of semantic information from the parafoveal word favors an explanation in terms of parallel word processing in reading.
Parafoveal Load of Word N+1 Modulates Preprocessing Effectivenessof Word N+2 in Chinese Reading
(2010)
Preview benefits (PBs) from two words to the right of the fixated one (i.e., word N+2)and associated parafoveal-on-foveal effects are critical for proposals of distributed lexical processing during reading. This experiment examined parafoveal processing during reading of Chinese sentences, using a boundary manipulation of N+2-word preview with low- and high-frequency words N+1. The main findings were (a) an identity PB for word N+2 that was (b) primarily observed when word N+1 was of high frequency (i.e., an interaction between frequency of word N+1 and PB for word N+2), and (c) a parafoveal-on-foveal frequency effect of word N+1 for fixation durations on word N. We discuss implications for theories of serial attention shifts and parallel distributed processing of words during reading.
Human information processing depends critically on continuous predictions about upcoming events, but the temporal convergence of expectancy-based top-down and input-driven bottom-up streams is poorly understood. We show that, during reading, event-related potentials differ between exposure to highly predictable and unpredictable words no later than 90 ms after visual input. This result suggests an extremely rapid comparison of expected and incoming visual information and gives an upper temporal bound for theories of top-down and bottom-up interactions in object recognition.
We examined individual differences in masked repetition priming by re-analyzing item-level response-time (RT) data from three experiments. Using a linear mixed model (LMM) with subjects and items specified as crossed random factors, the originally reported priming and word-frequency effects were recovered. In the same LMM, we estimated parameters describing the distributions of these effects across subjects. Subjects’ frequency and priming effects correlated positively with each other and negatively with mean RT. These correlation estimates, however, emerged only with a reciprocal transformation of RT (i.e., -1/RT), justified on the basis of distributional analyses. Different correlations, some with opposite sign, were obtained (1) for untransformed or logarithmic RTs or (2) when correlations were computed using within-subject analyses. We discuss the relevance of the new results for accounts of masked priming, implications of applying RT transformations, and the use of LMMs as a tool for the joint analysis of experimental effects and associated individual differences.