Models of eye guidance in reading rely on the concept of the perceptual span-the amount of information perceived during a single eye fixation, which is considered to be a consequence of visual and attentional constraints. To directly investigate attentional mechanisms underlying the perceptual span, we implemented a new reading paradigm-parafoveal magnification (PM)-that compensates for how vis...

One controversial question in the field of eye movements and reading is whether there is evidence of parafoveal-on-foveal effects. This is an important issue because some models of eye movements in reading make quite different predictions in this respect (e.g., E-Z Reader vs. SWIFT models). The aim of the current study was to investigate if parafoveal-on-foveal effects occur when reading Thai, ...

PURPOSE To investigate the distribution of cone density and spacing as well as the preferred packing arrangement of the cone mosaic as a function of retinal eccentricity. METHODS An adaptive optics retinal camera (rtx1, www.imagine-eyes.com) was used to obtain images of the parafoveal cone mosaic in nineteen healthy volunteers. Cone density and spacing were estimated for each subject (both ey...

Photopic directional sensitivity was measured at the fovea and at 2°, 3.75°, and 10° from fixation (referred to the center of the entrance pupil of the eye; nonfoveal tests were conducted in the nasal field projected onto temporal retina). These data confirm and extend an earlier experiment performed by Westheimer. The central fovea exhibited significantly less directionality than parafoveal te...

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 ...

In order to understand how processing occurs within the effective field of vision (i.e. perceptual span) during visual target localization, a gaze-contingent moving mask procedure was used to disrupt parafoveal information pickup along the vertical and the horizontal visual fields. When the mask was present within the horizontal visual field, there was a relative increase in saccade probability...

There is controversy concerning the question of whether meaning can be extracted from a parafoveal word during reading and whether this might occur in an overlapping fashion with the lexical processing of the currently-fixated word. We suggest that previous attempts to investigate this have been bedevilled by problems associated with the use of priming methodology. Instead, we used an eye movem...

Readers tend to skip words, particularly when they are short, frequent, or predictable. Angele and Rayner (2013) recently reported that readers are often unable to detect syntactic anomalies in parafoveal vision. In the present study, we manipulated target word predictability to assess whether contextual constraint modulates the-skipping behavior. The results provide further evidence that reade...

The main purpose of this study was to determine whether, during natural reading, the difficulty of the upcoming parafoveal word affects eye movement behaviour on the currently fixated word. A model in which visual attention is allocated in parallel over both the fixated and the upcoming parafoveal word predicts such as effect, while a sequential attention allocation model in which attention is ...

Sequential attention shift models of reading predict that an attended (typically fixated) word must be recognized before useful linguistic information can be obtained from the following (parafoveal) word. These models also predict that linguistic information is obtained from a parafoveal word immediately prior to a saccade toward it. To test these assumptions, sentences were constructed with a ...