The perceptual span in dyslexic reading and visual search.

Many studies have attempted to identify the root cause of dyslexia. Different theories of dyslexia have proposed either a phonological, attentional, or visual deficit. While research has used eye-tracking to study dyslexia, only two previous studies have used the moving-window paradigm to explore the perceptual span in dyslexic reading, and none have done so in visual search.

Dyslexics Exhibit an Orthographic, Not a Phonological Deficit in Lexical Decision.

Dyslexia is theorized to be caused by phonological deficits, visuo-attentional deficits, or some combination of the two. The present study contrasted phonological and visuo-attentional theories of dyslexia using a lexical decision task administered to adult participants with and without dyslexia. Homophone and pseudo-homophone stimuli were included to explore whether the two groups differed in their reliance on phonological encoding.

The effect of sudden-onset distractors on reading efficiency and comprehension.

Reading is an essential skill that requires focused attention. However, much reading is done in non-optimal environments. These days, reading is often done on digital devices or with a digital device nearby.

Spousal emotional support and relationship quality buffers pupillary response to horror movies.

Being satisfied in marriage provides protective stress buffering benefits to various health complications but the causal mechanisms and speed at which this is accomplished is less well understood. Much of the research on health and marriage has conceptualized marital quality in a unidimensional way, with high levels of either positivity or negativity. This conceptualization may not fully capture the nuanced benefits of marital relationships.

Best practices in eye tracking research.

This guide describes best practices in using eye tracking technology for research in a variety of disciplines. A basic outline of the anatomy and physiology of the eyes and of eye movements is provided, along with a description of the sorts of research questions eye tracking can address. We then explain how eye tracking technology works and what sorts of data it generates, and provide guidance on how to select and use an eye tracker as well as selecting appropriate eye tracking measures.

The effect of convolving word length, word frequency, function word predictability and first pass reading time in the analysis of a fixation-related fMRI dataset.

The data presented in this document was created to explore the effect of including or excluding word length, word frequency, the lexical predictability of function words and first pass reading time (or the duration of the first fixation on a word) as either baseline regressors or duration modulators on the final analysis for a fixation-related fMRI investigation of linguistic processing. The effect of these regressors was a central question raised during the review of [1]. Three datasets were created and compared to the original dataset to determine their effect.

Separate contributions of autistic traits and anxious apprehension, but not alexithymia, to emotion processing in faces.

Reduced eye fixation has been commonly reported in autistic samples but may be at least partially explained by alexithymia (i.e., difficulty understanding and describing one's emotional state).

Supportive hand-holding attenuates pupillary responses to stress in adult couples.

Background: Social relationships, particularly marriage, have been shown to ameliorate the potentially pathogenic impact of stressful events but prior research has been mostly aimed at downstream effects, with less research on real-time reactivity. Pupillometry is an innovative procedure that allows us to see the effects of acute stress in real time. The muscles that control pupil size are linked to the autonomic nervous system, so that when stressed, the pupils dilate; this occurs within 200ms.

Psychophysiological Arousal and Auditory Sensitivity in a Cross-Clinical Sample of Autistic and Non-autistic Anxious Adults.

Many autistic people report overwhelming sensory experiences and also elevated levels of anxiety. Understanding how these experiences are linked to each other can contribute to improved support and intervention for reducing sensory overload and anxiety. This study included 95 young adult participants including autistic adults, non-autistic adults reporting to a psychotherapy clinic with high levels of anxiety, and neurotypical adults with no psychiatric concerns.

Linguistic networks associated with lexical, semantic and syntactic predictability in reading: A fixation-related fMRI study.

The ability to make predictions is thought to facilitate language processing. During language comprehension such predictions appear to occur at multiple levels of linguistic representations (i.e.

Influences on and consequences of parafoveal preview in reading.

During reading, information is extracted from upcoming words to the right of the currently fixated word, which facilitates recognition of those words when they are later fixated. According to the foveal load hypothesis (Henderson & Ferreira, 1990), this parafoveal preview benefit depends on how difficult the currently fixated word is to recognize. Furthermore, there is evidence that the influence of lexical variables (frequency and predictability) on word processing changes when no preview of that word is available.

Predicting eye-movement characteristics across multiple tasks from working memory and executive control.

Individual differences in working memory (WM) and executive control are stable, related to cognitive task performance, and clinically predictive. Between-participant differences in eye movements are also highly reliable (Carter & Luke, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2018; Henderson & Luke, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 40(4), 1390-1400, 2014). However, little is known about how higher order individual differences in cognition are related to these eye-movement characteristics.

Individuals' eye movements in reading are highly consistent across time and trial.

Eye movements are used to study a variety of cognitive phenomena, including attention, perception, memory, language, reading, decision making, and many others, as well as cognitive impairments and individual differences in cognition. These studies assume, with little evidence, that eye movements are stable across time and trials. Eye movement stability must be better characterized to understand the full theoretical and clinical implications of individual differences in eye movement behavior.

The Provo Corpus: A large eye-tracking corpus with predictability norms.

This article presents the Provo Corpus, a corpus of eye-tracking data with accompanying predictability norms. The predictability norms for the Provo Corpus differ from those of other corpora. In addition to traditional cloze scores that estimate the predictability of the full orthographic form of each word, the Provo Corpus also includes measures of the predictability of the morpho-syntactic and semantic information for each word.

Neural correlates of individual differences in fixation duration during natural reading.

Reading requires integration of language and cognitive processes with attention and eye movement control. Individuals differ in their reading ability, but little is known about the neurocognitive processes associated with these individual differences. To investigate this issue, we combined eyetracking and fMRI, simultaneously recording eye movements and BOLD activity while subjects read text passages.

Evaluating significance in linear mixed-effects models in R.

Mixed-effects models are being used ever more frequently in the analysis of experimental data. However, in the lme4 package in R the standards for evaluating significance of fixed effects in these models (i.e.

Limits on lexical prediction during reading.

Efficient language processing may involve generating expectations about upcoming input. To investigate the extent to which prediction might facilitate reading, a large-scale survey provided cloze scores for all 2689 words in 55 different text passages. Highly predictable words were quite rare (5% of content words), and most words had a more-expected competitor.

Why reread? Evidence from garden-path and local coherence structures.

Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to compare the online reading and offline comprehension of main verb/reduced relative garden-path sentences and local coherence sentences. Rereading of early material in garden-path reduced relatives should be revisionary, aimed at reanalysing an earlier misparse; however, rereading of early material in a local coherence reduced relative need only be confirmatory, as the original parse of the earlier portion of these sentences is ultimately correct. Results of online and offline measures showed that local coherence structures elicited signals of reading disruption that arose earlier and lasted longer, and local coherence comprehension was also better than garden path comprehension.

The Influence of Content Meaningfulness on Eye Movements across Tasks: Evidence from Scene Viewing and Reading.

The present study investigated the influence of content meaningfulness on eye-movement control in reading and scene viewing. Texts and scenes were manipulated to make them uninterpretable, and then eye-movements in reading and scene-viewing were compared to those in pseudo-reading and pseudo-scene viewing. Fixation durations and saccade amplitudes were greater for pseudo-stimuli.

Neural correlates of fixation duration in natural reading: Evidence from fixation-related fMRI.

A key assumption of current theories of natural reading is that fixation duration reflects underlying attentional, language, and cognitive processes associated with text comprehension. The neurocognitive correlates of this relationship are currently unknown. To investigate this relationship, we compared neural activation associated with fixation duration in passage reading and a pseudo-reading control condition.

Children's eye-movements during reading reflect the quality of lexical representations: An individual differences approach.

The lexical quality hypothesis (Perfetti & Hart, 2002) suggests that skilled reading requires high-quality lexical representations. In children, these representations are still developing, and it has been suggested that this development leads to more adult-like eye-movement behavior during the reading of connected text. To test this idea, a set of young adolescents (aged 11-13 years) completed a standardized measure of lexical quality and then participated in 3 eye-movement tasks: reading, scene search, and pseudoreading.

Dissociating temporal inhibition of return and saccadic momentum across multiple eye-movement tasks.

Saccade latencies are longer prior to an eye movement to a recently fixated location than to control locations, a phenomenon known as oculomotor inhibition of return (O-IOR). There are theoretical reasons to expect that O-IOR would vary in magnitude across different eye movement tasks, but previous studies have produced contradictory evidence. However, this may have been because previous studies have not dissociated O-IOR and a related phenomenon, saccadic momentum, which is a bias to repeat saccade programs that also influences saccade latencies.

Morphology of primary visual cortex predicts individual differences in fixation duration during text reading.

In skilled reading, fixations are brief periods of time in which the eyes settle on words. E-Z Reader, a computational model of dynamic reading, posits that fixation durations are under real-time control of lexical processing. Lexical processing, in turn, requires efficient visual encoding.

Stable individual differences in saccadic eye movements during reading, pseudoreading, scene viewing, and scene search.

Mean fixation duration and mean saccade amplitude during active viewing tasks differ from person to person. Previous studies have shown that these individual differences tend to be stable across at least some tasks, suggesting that they may reflect underlying traits associated with individuals. However, whether these individual differences are also stable over time has not been established.