Determinants of eye-fixation duration

Four variables that might be presumed to contribute to the duration of an eye fixation were investigated in a series of seven experiments. These variables were stimulus processing time, relative emphasis on speed or accuracy, sequential dependencies across successive fixations, and amplitude of the preceding and following saccades. The pattern of results suggested a two-component model to account for the duration of single eye-fixations. One component is the minimum pause time of the eye, estimated to be about 200 msec without any stimulus processing. The second component involves stimulus processing, estimated to require a minimum of 50 to 100 msec, but subject to a number of influences that can substantially increase or decrease this duration. Although the authors did not generate this model to account for eye movements in complex tasks such as reading, they speculate about how complications could be added.