Related Experiment Video
Updated: Mar 24, 2026
Eye-tracking to Distinguish Comprehension-based and Oculomotor-based Regressive Eye Movements During Reading
Published on: October 18, 2018
Can We 'Read' the Eye-Movement Patterns of Readers? Unraveling the Relationship Between Reading Profiles and
Arnout Koornneef1, Iris Mulders2
1Institute of Education and Child Studies, Leiden University, Pieter de la Court gebouw, Wassenaarseweg 52, 2333 AK, Leiden, The Netherlands. a.w.koornneef@fsw.leidenuniv.nl.
Abstract:
In an eye-tracking experiment we examined the risky reading hypothesis, in which long saccades and many regressions are considered to be indicative of a proactive reading style (Rayner et al. in Psychol Aging 21(3):448, 2006; Psychol Aging 24(3):755, 2009). We did so by presenting short texts-that confirmed or disconfirmed verb-based implicit causality expectations-to two types of readers: proactive readers (long saccades, many regressions) and conservative readers (short saccades, few regressions). Whereas proactive readers used implicit causality information to predict upcoming referents, and slowed down immediately when they encountered a pronoun that was inconsistent with these verb-based expectations, the conservative readers slowed down much later in the sentence. These findings were consistent with the predictions of the risky reading hypothesis and as such presented novel evidence for the general idea that the eye-movement profile of readers reveals valuable information about their processing strategy.
