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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Mar 18, 2026

Eye-tracking to Distinguish Comprehension-based and Oculomotor-based Regressive Eye Movements During Reading

Eye-tracking to Distinguish Comprehension-based and Oculomotor-based Regressive Eye Movements During Reading

Published on: October 18, 2018

Evidence for a global oculomotor program in reading.

Noor Al-Zanoon¹, Michael Dambacher², Victor Kuperman³

¹Department of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Western Ontario, 1151 Richmond St, London, ON, N6A 3K7, Canada. nalzanoo@western.ca.

Psychological Research

|July 13, 2016

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Reading involves a global oculomotor program influencing eye movements at the start of sentences. This "start-up effect" primarily relies on visual, not linguistic, features for planning eye movements.

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Neuroscience
Ophthalmology

Background:

Eye-movement studies reveal a "start-up effect" in reading, characterized by increased saccade amplitudes and fixation durations at sentence beginnings.
This suggests a global oculomotor program for line-level processing, complementing local visual span programs.

Purpose of the Study:

To experimentally investigate the nature of the global oculomotor program in reading.
To determine if the start-up effect is driven by visual or linguistic characteristics.
To ascertain whether the effect is more pronounced in saccade amplitudes, fixation durations, or both.

Main Methods:

Recorded eye movements of 38 participants reading normal sentences, random word sequences, and z-strings.
Manipulated word length variability (Nonequal vs. Equal conditions) to dissociate positional effects.
Controlled for visual similarity while varying syntactic and lexical information.

Main Results:

A significant start-up effect in saccade amplitudes was observed across all Nonequal stimuli and in an attenuated form in Equal sentences.
A start-up effect in fixation durations appeared in Nonequal and Equal normal sentences but was absent in z-strings.
The start-up effect was robust in saccade amplitudes, suggesting a primary role for spatial planning.

Conclusions:

Findings support a global oculomotor program in reading, particularly for spatial aspects of motor planning.
The start-up effect appears to be primarily driven by visual information rather than linguistic content.
This research clarifies the interplay between visual and linguistic factors in reading eye movements.