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Updated: Aug 11, 2026
Using Eye Movements to Evaluate the Cognitive Processes Involved in Text Comprehension
Published on: January 10, 2014
Tracking the mind during reading: the influence of past, present, and future words on fixation durations
Reinhold Kliegl1, Antje Nuthmann, Ralf Engbert
1University of Potsdam, PO Box 60 15 53, 14451 Potsdam, Germany. kliegl@rz.uni-potsdam.de
Abstract:
Reading requires the orchestration of visual, attentional, language-related, and oculomotor processing constraints. This study replicates previous effects of frequency, predictability, and length of fixated words on fixation durations in natural reading and demonstrates new effects of these variables related to 144 sentences. Such evidence for distributed processing of words across fixation durations challenges psycholinguistic immediacy-of-processing and eye-mind assumptions. Most of the time the mind processes several words in parallel at different perceptual and cognitive levels. Eye movements can help to unravel these processes.
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