The use of gaze-contingent display techniques to study reading has shown that readers attend not only the currently fixated word, but also the word to the right of the current fixation. However, a ...critical look at the literature shows that a number of questions cannot be readily answered from the available literature reviews on the topic. First, there is no consensus as to whether readers also attend the second word to the right of fixation. Second, it is not clear whether parafoveal processing is more efficient in languages such as Chinese. Third, it is not well understood whether the measured effects are confounded by the properties of the parafoveal mask. In the present study, we addressed these issues by performing a Bayesian meta-analysis of 93 experiments that used the boundary paradigm (Rayner,
Cognitive Psychology, 7,
65–81. doi:
10.1016/0010-028590005-5
,
1975
). We describe three main findings: (1) The advantage of previewing the second word to the right is modest in size and likely is not centered on zero; (2) Chinese readers do seem to make more efficient use of parafoveal processing, but this is mostly evident in gaze durations; and (3) there are interference effects associated with using different parafoveal masks that roughly increase when the mask is less word-like.
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OBVAL, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
It has been suggested that listening to music during reading may be distracting, but the empirical results have remained inconclusive. One limitation of previous studies is that they have often had ...limited control over the number of lyrics present in the songs. We report 4 experiments that investigated whether song lyrics make music distracting. Participants read short paragraphs in a self-paced reading paradigm in three sound conditions: 1) silence; 2) lyrical songs at ∼150 words per minute; and 3) the instrumental version of the same songs. The results showed that listening to instrumental music either did not affect reading times or led to slightly faster reading times compared to silence. However, lyrical music led to an increase in reading times in three experiments. We conclude that instrumental music does not lead to distraction during reading. Song lyrics appear to be distracting, even if the observed distraction is quite mild.
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BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
Novel sounds that unexpectedly deviate from a repetitive sound sequence are well known to cause distraction. Such unexpected sounds have also been shown to cause global motor inhibition, suggesting ...that they trigger a neurophysiological response aimed at stopping ongoing actions. Recently, evidence from eye movements has suggested that unexpected sounds also temporarily pause the movements of the eyes during reading, though it is unclear if this effect is due to inhibition of oculomotor planning or inhibition of language processes. Here, we sought to distinguish between these two possibilities by comparing a natural reading task to a letter scanning task that involves similar oculomotor demands to reading, but no higher level lexical processing. Participants either read sentences for comprehension or scanned letter strings of these sentences for the letter 'o' in three auditory conditions: silence, standard, and novel sounds. The results showed that novel sounds were equally distracting in both tasks, suggesting that they generally inhibit ongoing oculomotor processes independent of lexical processing. These results suggest that novel sounds may have a global suppressive effect on eye-movement control.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
Everyday reading occurs in different settings, such as on the train to work, in a busy cafeteria, or at home while listening to music. In these situations, readers are exposed to external auditory ...stimulation from nearby noise, speech, or music that may distract them from their task and reduce their comprehension. Although many studies have investigated auditory-distraction effects during reading, the results have proved to be inconsistent and sometimes even contradictory. In addition, the broader theoretical implications of the findings have not always been explicitly considered. We report a Bayesian meta-analysis of 65 studies on auditory-distraction effects during reading and use metaregression models to test predictions derived from existing theories. The results showed that background noise, speech, and music all have a small but reliably detrimental effect on reading performance. The degree of disruption in reading comprehension did not generally differ between adults and children. Intelligible speech and lyrical music resulted in the biggest distraction. Although this last result is consistent with theories of semantic distraction, there was also reliable distraction by noise. It is argued that new theoretical models are needed that can account for distraction by both background speech and noise.
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NUK, OILJ, SAZU, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
We introduce a novel Dual Input Stream Transformer (DIST) for the challenging problem of assigning fixation points from eye-tracking data collected during passage reading to the line of text that the ...reader was actually focused on. This post-processing step is crucial for analysis of the reading data due to the presence of noise in the form of vertical drift. We evaluate DIST against eleven classical approaches on a comprehensive suite of nine diverse datasets. We demonstrate that combining multiple instances of the DIST model in an ensemble achieves high accuracy across all datasets. Further combining the DIST ensemble with the best classical approach yields an average accuracy of 98.17 %. Our approach presents a significant step towards addressing the bottleneck of manual line assignment in reading research. Through extensive analysis and ablation studies, we identify key factors that contribute to DIST's success, including the incorporation of line overlap features and the use of a second input stream. Via rigorous evaluation, we demonstrate that DIST is robust to various experimental setups, making it a safe first choice for practitioners in the field.
Return-sweeps are an essential eye-movement that takes the readers’ eyes from the end of one line of text to the start of the next. While return-sweeps are common during normal reading, the ...eye-movement literature is dominated by single-line reading studies where no return-sweeps are needed. The present experiment was designed to explore what readers are targeting with their return-sweeps. Participants read two short stories by Frank L. Baum while their eye-movements were being recorded. In one story, every line-initial word was highlighted by formatting it in bold, while the other story was presented normally (i.e., without any bolding). The bolding manipulation significantly reduced oculomotor error associated with return-sweeps, as these saccades landed closer to the left margin and were less likely to require corrective saccades compared to the control condition. However, despite this reduction in oculomotor error, the bolding had no influence on local fixation durations or global reading-time measures. Moreover, return-sweep landing sites were not impacted by line-initial word length nor did the effect of bolding interact with the length of the line-initial word, suggesting that readers were not targeting the centre of line-initial words. We discuss the implication of these findings for return-sweep targeting and eye-movement control during reading.
It is not well understood whether background speech affects the initial processing of words during reading or only the later processes of sentence integration. Additionally, it is not clear how eye ...movements support text comprehension in the face of distraction by background speech and noise. In the present research, participants read single sentences (Experiment 1) and short paragraphs (Experiments 2-3) in 4 sound conditions: silence, speech-spectrum Gaussian noise, English speech (intelligible to participants), and Mandarin speech (unintelligible to participants). Intelligible speech did not affect the lexical access of words and had a limited effect on the first-pass fixations of words. However, it led to more regressions and more rereading fixations compared with both unintelligible speech and silence. The results suggested that the distraction is mostly semantic in nature, and there was only limited evidence for a contribution of phonology. Finally, intelligible speech disrupted comprehension only when participants were prevented from rereading previous words. These findings suggest that the semantic properties of irrelevant speech can disrupt the ongoing reading process, but that this disruption occurs in the postlexical stages of reading when participants need to integrate words to form the sentence context and to construct a coherent discourse of the text.
Public Significance Statement
Listening to irrelevant speech in the background often disrupts reading efficiency. To better understand why this occurs, we recorded participants' eye movements as they read single sentences and short paragraphs in conditions of speech and noise. We found that irrelevant speech is distracting when participants can process its meaning. The meaning of the speech sound did not affect the lexical identification of words in the text, but it resulted in greater rereading of previous words. This increase in rereading behavior was found to occur because participants attempt to maintain the immediate comprehension of the text in the distracting reading conditions. Once they were no longer able to reread words, comprehension was negatively affected.
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CEKLJ, FFLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PEFLJ, UPUK
•Saccades to the next line of text (return-sweeps) are influenced by font size.•Font size also affects the probability of making a correction after return-sweeps.•Readers use font size information to ...help them reach the next line of text.
Reading saccades that occur within a single line of text are guided by the size of letters. However, readers occasionally need to make longer saccades (known as return-sweeps) that take their eyes from the end of one line of text to the beginning of the next. In this study, we tested whether return-sweep saccades are also guided by font size information and whether this guidance depends on visual acuity of the return-sweep target area. To do this, we manipulated the font size of letters (0.29 vs 0.39° per character) and the length of the first line of text (16 vs 26°). The larger font resulted in return-sweeps that landed further to the right of the line start and in a reduction of under-sweeps compared to the smaller font. This suggests that font size information is used when programming return-sweeps. Return-sweeps in the longer line condition landed further to the right of the line start and the proportion of under-sweeps increased compared to the short line condition. This likely reflects an increase in saccadic undershoot error with the increase in intended saccade size. Critically, there was no interaction between font size and line length. This suggests that when programming return-sweeps, the use of font size information does not depend on visual acuity at the saccade target. Instead, it appears that readers rely on global typographic properties of the text in order to maintain an optimal number of characters to the left of their first fixation on a new line.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Performance in sustained attention tasks is known to be slowed by the occurrence of unexpected task-irrelevant distractors (novelty distraction) and the detection of errors (posterror slowing), 2 ...well-established phenomena studied separately and regarded as reflecting distinct underpinning mechanisms. We measured novelty distraction and posterror slowing in an auditory-visual oddball task to test the hypothesis that they both involve an orienting response. Our results confirm that the 2 effects exhibit a positive interaction. We show that a trial-by-trial measure of surprise credibly accounts for our empirical data. We suggest that novelty distraction and posterror slowing both reflect an orienting response to unexpected events and a reappraisal of action plans.
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CEKLJ, FFLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PEFLJ, UPUK
Since the characteristics and symptoms of both schizophrenia and schizotypy are manifested heterogeneously, it is possible that different endophenotypes and neurophysiological measures (sensory ...gating and smooth pursuit eye movement errors) represent different clusters of symptoms. Participants (N = 205) underwent a standard conditioned-pairing paradigm to establish their sensory gating ratio, a smooth-pursuit eye-movement task, a latent inhibition task, and completed the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire. A Multidimensional Scaling analysis revealed that sensory gating was related to positive and disorganised dimensions of schizotypy. Latent inhibition and prepulse inhibition were not related to any dimension of schizotypy. Smooth pursuit eye movement error was unrelated to sensory gating and latent inhibition, but was related to negative dimensions of schizotypy. Our findings suggest that the symptom clusters associated with two main endophenotypes are largely independent. To fully understand symptomology and outcomes of schizotypal traits, the different subtypes of schizotypy (and potentially, schizophrenia) ought to be considered separately rather than together.
•P50 sensory gating related to all dimensions of schizotypy.•SPEM correlates with negative and disorganised dimensions of schizotypy.•Prepulse inhibition unrelated to schizotypy.•P300 deviance detection related to disorganised dimension of schizotypy.•Different endophenotypes of schizotypy are related to different symptom clusters.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
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