Covert Attention and Eye Movements during Reading

Abstract

Eye movements were monitored during the reading of spatially transformed text in order to examine covert attentional processes in reading. In some conditions, the sequence of letters within a word was congruent with (i.e. in the same direction as) the sequence of words in the sentence; in other conditions the direction of letters within words and the direction of words in the sentence were incongruent. In addition, the window of visible text was varied so that in some conditions only the fixated word (and all preceding words) were visible, whereas in other conditions the fixated word and the succeeding word were both visible. Readers were able to extract more parafoveal information from text when the words themselves were normal than when the letters within the words were transformed. However, with practice, readers were able to use some parafoveal information even when the words were transformed. The most important finding was that the congruity of the word and letter order had no reliable effect on the ability to extract parafoveal information and influenced reading performance only when the words themselves were normal. We conclude that covert attention in reading is not a letter-by-letter scan that sweeps across the page, but either an asymmetric spotlight held constant on each fixation or a shifting of an attentional spotlight extending across multiletter units (possibly words) with the direction of shifts of attention closely coupled to the direction of eye movements.