The existence of a center of gravity effect during reading

Many experiments have shown the existence of a "global effect" during peripheral target fixation tasks: whatever the position of the target in peripheral vision, the eye lands first near the center of gravity of the global peripheral configuration. The present paper investigates whether such an effect might be present during text reading. The experiments reported tested whether the eye's initial landing position in a test word was affected by the presence of other words or stimuli in the peripheral visual field. Results showed that essentially the information present up to seven characters from the beginning of the test word influenced the eye's landing position in the test word. Moreover, the position where the eye landed corresponded to the location of the cortically weighted center of gravity of this critical peripheral configuration. On the basis of these results, new hypotheses were proposed to explain saccade length programming and eye guidance during reading.