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Eye-tracking to Distinguish Comprehension-based and Oculomotor-based Regressive Eye Movements During Reading
Published on: October 18, 2018
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Reading during the composition of multi-sentence texts: an eye-movement study
Mark Torrance1, Roger Johansson2, Victoria Johansson3
1Psychology Division, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK. mark.torrance@ntu.ac.uk.
Psychological Research
|June 30, 2015
Summary
Writers look back at their text about 13% of the time, often before starting new sentences. This "look-back" behavior is crucial for planning writing, not just error checking.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Writing Studies
- Human-Computer Interaction
Background:
- Writers have visual access to their text during composition.
- The detailed patterns of eye movements within a writer's own text are not well understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the characteristics of writers' eye movements within their own text during writing.
- To compare writers' eye movements when producing text versus reading provided text.
Main Methods:
- Eye movements of competent adult writers were tracked during short expository writing tasks.
- Participants also read and evaluated researcher-provided texts for comparison.
Main Results:
- Writers spent approximately 13% of their time looking back at their own text.
- Look-back behavior was frequently initiated at linguistic boundaries, such as before starting a new sentence.
- Eye movements during look-back involved both sustained reading and "hopping" between words, indicating lexical processing.
Conclusions:
- Examining writers' eye fixations within their own text is technically feasible and valuable.
- Look-back behavior plays a significant role in planning ongoing text production, beyond simple error monitoring.
