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Updated: Jan 28, 2026

Eye-tracking to Distinguish Comprehension-based and Oculomotor-based Regressive Eye Movements During Reading
Published on: October 18, 2018
Effects of Self-Enhancement on Eye Movements During Reading
Ya Lou1,2,3, Huajian Cai1,2, Xuewei Liu1,2
1CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Beijing, China.
Abstract:
Previous studies show that readers' eye movements are influenced by text properties and readers' personal cognitive characteristics. In the current study, we further show that readers' eye movements are influenced by a social motivation of self-enhancement. We asked participants to silently read sentences that describe self or others with positive or negative traits while their eyes were monitored. First-fixation duration and gaze duration were longer when positive words were used to describe self than to describe others, but there was no such effect for negative words. These results suggest that eye movements can be influenced by the motivation of self-enhancement in addition to various stimuli features and cognitive factors. This finding indicates that the eye movement methodology can potentially be used to study implicit social cognition.
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