This Special Issue is devoted to honoring Professor George W. McConkie for his many contributions to the field of visual cognition. George pioneered the use of several eye-movement measures and paradigms that are now widely used in studies of reading, scene perception, and visual search. Knowingly or unknowingly, contemporary researchers who employ eye movement measurement to study visual cognition greatly benefit from George's foundational achievements. To celebrate his accomplishments, the present Special Issue contains a collection of papers that in one way or another build upon George's work.
It is clear that George's theoretical concepts, methodological innovations, and empirical discoveries have had lasting impact in the field of visual cognition. The sample of topics in this Special Issue corresponds to areas of research in which George was highly instrumental in originating important lines of investigation including: (1) the development of the gaze-contingent moving window paradigm (McConkie & Rayner, Citation1975) and gaze-contingent multi-resolutional displays (Loschky & McConkie, Citation2002; Reingold, Loschky, McConkie, & Stampe, Citation2003), (2) the study of skilled reading, including the study of the perceptual span (McConkie & Rayner, Citation1975) and detailed analyses of saccade targeting (McConkie, Kerr, Reddix, & Zola, Citation1988), (3) the study of eye movements in Chinese reading (Yang & McConkie, Citation1999), (4) the study of children's eye movements in reading (McConkie et al., Citation1991), (5) the use of eye movements to study language processing (McConkie, Hogoboam, Wolverton, Zola, & Lucas, Citation1979), (6) the development of models of eye movement control in reading (McConkie & Yang, Citation2003; Yang & McConkie, Citation2001), (7) the use of distributional analysis methods to study variability in fixation duration (McConkie & Dyre, Citation2000; McConkie, Kerr, & Dyre, Citation1994; Yang & McConkie, Citation2001), (8) the analysis of eye tracking data quality (McConkie, Citation1981), (9) scene perception across the field of view (Loschky & McConkie, Citation2002), and (10) trans-saccadic integration and the discovery of change blindnessFootnote1 (McConkie & Currie, Citation1996). For the most part, the articles in this Special Issue are focused on these topics, but reflecting George's work there is a heavy emphasis on reading. The articles are a mix of papers by former graduate and post-doctoral students and colleagues of George, but some are also written by others who were influenced by him. The three Editors of the Special Issue also represent this mix, with Keith Rayner as one of George's first students, Lester Loschky as one of his few last students, and Eyal Reingold someone who was deeply impressed with George's work and who spent time at Illinois learning from George.
George did his doctoral work in psychology at Stanford University dealing with issues of traditional verbal learning. He took his first position at Cornell University where it became his goal to extend verbal learning to more “real-life discourse” and for a number of years he pursued this research topic. But, along the way he became interested in the possibility of using eye movement data to study the reading process, and one great innovation was the development of the gaze-contingent moving window paradigm to examine how much information a reader obtained in an eye fixation. Although much of his other work was ground-breaking, the development of the gaze-contingent display change was perhaps his most well-known contribution. However, the articles in this Special Issue clearly document his influence across many domains. In 1979, George moved from Cornell to the University of Illinois, with his laboratory in the Beckman Institute. There he persuaded a number of colleagues in the Institute that there was considerable value in recording eye movements in various cognitive tasks, and proceeded to be very instrumental in the establishment and cultivation of a large network of successful eye movement laboratories at the Institute.
George was an excellent mentor who always had an open-door policy. He was highly supportive, but also demanding of students. His own recollections of the development of the gaze-contingent moving window paradigm (McConkie, Citation1997) reveal his strong commitment to research and his own personal beliefs. He was always more interested in the science than in his own narrow self-interest. We feel fortunate to have worked with him. All of the articles, with the exception of the first (which describes the development of the gaze-contingent window and reviews subsequent work using the paradigm) and last (which deals with the issue of eye tracking data quality), are original research articles. George's influence on the work should be apparent within each of the articles, and we trust that the readers of the journal will find the articles in this Special Issue to be both very interesting and informative.
Notes
1 The highly cited Grimes (Citation1996) study, which is often credited as the original “change blindness” publication, was done under the supervision of George, but he generously encouraged John Grimes to publish it as a single author.
REFERENCES
- Grimes, J. (1996). On the failure to detect changes in scenes across saccades. In K. A. Akins (Ed.), Perception (Vol. 5, pp. 89–110). New York: Oxford University Press.
- Loschky, L. C., & McConkie, G. W. (2002). Investigating spatial vision and dynamic attentional selection using a gaze-contingent multiresolutional display. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 9, 99–117. 10.1037/1076-898X.8.2.99
- McConkie, G. W. (1981). Evaluating and reporting data quality in eye movement research. Behavior Research Methods & Instrumentation, 13, 97–106. 10.3758/BF03207916
- McConkie, G. W. (1997). Eye movement contingent display control: Personal reflections and comments. Scientific Studies of Reading, 1, 303–316. 10.1207/s1532799xssr0104_1
- McConkie, G. W., & Currie, D. B. (1996). Visual stability across saccades while viewing complex pictures. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 22, 563–561. 10.1037/0096-1523.22.3.563
- McConkie, G. W., & Dyre, B. P. (2000). Eye fixation durations in reading: Models of frequency distributions. In A. Kennedy, R. Radach, D. Heller, & J. Pynte (Eds.), Reading as a perceptual process (pp. 683–700). Amsterdam: North-Holland.
- McConkie, G. W., Hogoboam, T. W., Wolverton, G. S.Zola, D. W., & Lucas, P. A. (1979). Toward the use of eye movements in the study of language processing. Discourse Processes, 2, 157–177. 10.1080/01638537909544463
- McConkie, G. W., Kerr, P. W., & Dyre, B. P. (1994). What are “normal” eye movements during reading: Toward a mathematical description. In J. Ygge & G. Lennerstand (Eds.), Eye movements in reading (pp. 315–327). New York, NY: Pergamon Press.
- McConkie, G. W., Kerr, P. W., Reddix, M. D., & Zola, D. (1988). Eye movement control in reading: 1. The location of initial eye fixations in words. Vision Research, 28, 1107–1118. 10.1016/0042-6989(88)90137-X
- McConkie, G. W., & Rayner, K. (1975). The span of the effective stimulus during a fixation in reading. Perception & Psychophysics, 17, 578–586. 10.3758/BF03203972
- McConkie, G. W., & Yang, S.-N. (2003). How cognition affects eye movements during reading. In J. Hyönä, R. Radach, & H. Deubel (Eds.), The mind's eye: Cognitive and applied aspects of eye movement research (pp. 413–427). Amsterdam: Elsevier Science.
- McConkie, G. W., Zola, D., Grimes, J., Kerr, P. W., Bryant, N. R., & Wolff, P. M. (1991). Children's eye movements during reading. In J. F. Stein (Ed.), Vision and visual dyslexia (pp. 252–262). London: Macmillan Press.
- Reingold, E. M., Loschky, L. C., McConkie, G. W., & Stampe, D. M. (2003). Gaze-contingent multi-resolutional displays: An integrative review. Human Factors, 45, 307–328 10.1518/hfes.45.2.307.27235
- Yang, H. M., & McConkie, G. W. (1999). Reading Chinese: Some basic eye-movement characteristics. In Y. Wang, A. W. Inhoff, & H.-C. Chen (Eds.), Reading Chinese script: A cognitive analysis (pps 207–222). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
- Yang, S.-N., & McConkie, G. W. (2001). Eye movements during reading: A theory of saccade-inhibition times. Vision Research, 26, 3567–3585. 10.1016/S0042-6989(01)00025-6