Dynamic modeling of eye-movement control in reading

• Applicant: Professor Reinhold Kliegl, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2007 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 34181293

• Final Report Year: 2016

Final Report Abstract

The number of times we look at words (and the durations associated with these fixations) are reliable and valid indicators of the orchestration of visual, attentional, language-related, memory-related, and oculomotor processes which in the end - if all works well - lead to the recognition of the meaning of words and the comprehension of text. Importantly, during a fixation we process not only the fixated word, but also a few of its neighbors. Nevertheless, the area from which we process information is severely limited by visual acuity. Therefore, which aspect of these words (visual, lexical, semantic, ...) become available at what time during processing is an area of much theoretical controversy and active experimental research and does depend on the local processing difficulty. Research on eye-movement control during reading is a fertile area for bringing together computational modeling, experimental-research, and individual-differences perspectives relating to these topics. The results of this project contributed from all three perspectives. We list main contributions. Computational modeling. Arguably, the computational model SWIFT 3 for saccade-generation during reading, featuring a dynamical modulation of the perceptual span in response to local processing difficulty, is still the most comprehensive proposal available. It adequately recovers a large number of benchmark effects relating to fixation durations and fixation locations. It also appears to hold up well for modeling individual differences in effects of word frequency on fixation durations. Experimental research. The project contributed important results about parafoveal processing during reading (e.g., semantic preview benefit, delayed parafoveal-on-foveal effects) as well as the modulation of these effects (e.g., capitalization of nouns, introduced an experimental paradigm that allows for explicit dissociations between theoretical propositions that have been proposed independently, some of them in an antagonistic fashion. Along the way, we introduced new or extended traditional gaze-contingent display-change experimental paradigms. Individual differences. The integration of individual differences in theories about eye-movement control during reading will remain a challenge. (G)LMMs are a very promising methodology for the joint analysis of experimental effects and individual differences in experimental effects. Moreover, they provide for a seamless integration of effects due to factorial experimental manipulations and covariates describing the random factors subjects and items.

Publications

• (2012). Evidence for delayed parafoveal-on-foveal effects from word n+ 2 in reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 38(4):1026–1042
  Risse, S., and Kliegl, R.
  
• (2012). The zoom lens of attention: Simulating shuffled versus normal text reading using the SWIFT model. Visual Cognition, 20(4-5):391–421
  Schad, D. J., and Engbert, R.
  
• (2013). A framework for modeling the interaction of syntactic processing and eye movement control. Topics in Cognitive Science, 5(3):452–474
  Engelmann, F., Vasishth, S., Engbert, R., and Kliegl, R.
  
• (2013). How preview space/time translates into preview cost/benefit for fixation durations during reading. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66(3):581–600
  Kliegl, R., Hohenstein, S., Yan, M., and McDonald, S. A.
  
• (2014). A theoretical analysis of the perceptual span based on SWIFT simulations of the n+2 boundary paradigm. Visual Cognition, 22(3-4):283–308
  Risse, S., Hohenstein, S., Kliegl, R., and Engbert, R.
  
• (2014). Dissociating preview validity and preview difficulty in parafoveal processing of word n+1 during reading. Journal of Experimental Psycholog: Human Perception and Performance, 40(2):653–668
  Risse, S., and Kliegl, R.
  
• (2014). Effects of visual span on reading speed and parafoveal processing in eye movements during sentence reading. Journal of Vision, 14(8):11, 1–13
  Risse, S.
  
• (2014). Semantic preview benefit during reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(1):166–190
  Hohenstein, S., and Kliegl, R.
  
• (2016). Linked linear mixed models: A joint analysis of fixation locations and fixation durations in natural reading. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
  Hohenstein, S., Matuschek, H., and Kliegl, R.