The dynamics of attention in active reading and effects of load

Year of Publication

2014

Abstract

We investigated the dynamics of spatial attention in an active viewing task, namely reading, and the effects of the load of target words on these dynamics. We showed that, over the course of a fixation, attention was modulated by the load of the fixated word and the upcoming word.

The load of words was manipulated by varying word frequency and the orthographic familiarity of the first trigram in words. In a variation of the dynamic-orienting paradigm (Fischer, 1999), participants read sentences or strings of words for the primary task and discriminated gaze-contingent probes - occurring with