Eye movements in reading versus nonreading tasks: Using E-Z Reader to understand the role of word/stimulus familiarity

Abstract

In this paper, we extend our previous work (Reichle, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 2012) using the principles of the E-Z Reader model to examine the factors that determine when and where the eyes move in both reading and nonreading tasks, and in particular the role that word/stimulus familiarity plays in determining when the eyes move from one word/stimulus to the next. In doing this, we first provide a brief overview of E-Z Reader, including its assumption that word familiarity is the “engine” driving eye movements during reading. We then review the theoretical considerations that motivated this assumption, as well as recent empirical evidence supporting its validity. We also report the results of three new simulations that were intended to demonstrate the utility of the familiarity check in three tasks: (1) reading; (2) searching for a target word embedded in text; and (3) searching for the letter O in linear arrays of Landolt Cs. The results of these simulations suggest that the familiarity check always improves task efficiency by speeding its rate of performance. We provide several arguments as to why this conclusion is not likely to be true for the two nonreading tasks, and, in the final section of the paper, we provide a fourth simulation to test the hypothesis that problems associated with the misidentification of words may also curtail the too liberal use of word familiarity.

Keywords:

• E-Z Reader
• Familiarity
• Landolt-C search
• Reading
• Saccades
• Visual search

Acknowledgements

The work reported in this paper was supported by grants HD053639 and HD26765 from the National Institutes of Health.

Notes

¹Salvucci (2001) used the EMMA model to simulate patterns of eye movements observed during reading, equation solving, and driving. Because this model is implemented within the more general framework of the ACT-R cognitive architecture (Anderson & Lebiere, 1998), it provides a single set of assumptions for explaining eye-movement control in a variety of visual-cognitive tasks.

²For further discussion of the saccadic-programming deadline hypothesis, see Engbert and Kliegl (2001) and Henderson and Ferreira (1990).

³The average reading rate for college-level readers is 250–350 words per minute (Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989).

⁴The simulations reported by Pollatsek, Juhasz, Reichle, Machacek, and Rayner (2008) provide a similar test of this word misidentification hypothesis.