Eye movements during mindless reading: Experiments and computational modeling

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ralf Engbert
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2007 to 2012
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 43741491

It sometimes happens that we finish reading a page of text just to realize that we have no idea what we just read. During these episodes of mindless reading our mind is elsewhere yet the eyes still move across the text. Recent progress in understanding this phenomenon has been achieved by using subjective self-report measures. In the current project, we investigated the full range of different levels of mindless reading in an eye tracking laboratory based on several experimental approaches: z-string scanning, reading lists of shuffled words, reading with a distractor task, skimming of text, and reading very long passages of boring texts during sessions of several hours. Using advanced statistical analyses (linear mixed effects models), we observed strong effects of mindlessness visible in measure of eyemovement control. Additionally, we performed numerical simulation of a computational model of eye-movement control on two of the experimental paradigms. For the renewal proposal, we planned to continue this research with detailed statistical analyses of recorded experimental data from the first period, with new experiments, and with more computational modeling to infer the influence of different mindless reading conditions on attentional, lexical, and oculomotor processes.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants