Two different forms of parafoveal dysfunction have been hypothesized as core deficits of dyslexic individuals: reduced parafoveal preview benefits ("too little parafovea") and increased costs of parafoveal load ("too much parafovea"). We tested both hypotheses in a single eye-tracking experiment using a modified serial rapid automatized naming (RAN) task. Comparisons between dyslexic and non-dy...

We report a case of Coats disease in a 9-year-old boy who had a profound visual deficit and increasing pain in his right eye. Funduscopic examination revealed a complex, exudative retinal detachment with a subretinal mass and peripheral retinal telangiectasis. B-scan ultrasonography revealed a heterogeneously echogenic subretinal mass with several highly reflective foci consistent with calcific...

An experiment is reported which demonstrates that contextual constraints and parafoveal visual information interact during reading. As subjects read sentences, the parafoveal visual information available from a target area in the sentence was varied: the parafoveal information was either visually similar or dissimilar to a target word the subject would later fixate. The visual similarity of the...

Parafoveal-on-foveal priming refers to the presentation of an item (the prime) in parafoveal vision followed by the presentation of an item (the target) in foveal vision. In natural reading, the 'parafoveal preview benefit' subserves fluent reading as, e.g., reading times increase when such information is not available. Yet, the neural correlates of reading are mostly studied with foveally pres...

During text reading, the parafoveal word was usually presented between 2° and 5° from the point of fixation. Whether semantic information of parafoveal words can be processed during sentence reading is a critical and long-standing issue. Recently, studies using the RSVP-flanker paradigm have shown that the incongruent parafoveal word, presented as right flanker, elicited a more negative N400 co...

Semantic processing from parafoveal words is an elusive phenomenon in alphabetic languages, but it has been demonstrated only for a restricted set of non-compound Chinese characters. Using the gaze contingent boundary paradigm, this experiment examined whether parafoveal lexical and sub-lexical semantic information was extracted from compound preview characters. Results generalized parafoveal s...

This study investigates the effect of foveal load (i.e., processing difficulty of currently fixated words) on parafoveal information processing. Contrary to the commonly accepted view that high foveal load leads to reduced parafoveal processing efficiency, results of the present study showed that increasing foveal visual (but not linguistic) processing load actually increased the amount of para...

An eye-movement-contingent display change technique was employed to study whether adult readers extract semantic information from parafoveal words during reading. Three types of parafoveal preview conditions were contrasted: an emotional word, a neutral word, and an identical word condition. To have a maximally effective parafoveal manipulation, high-arousal emotional words (sex- and threat-rel...