Motion Verbs Eye-Tracking During Reading Study

Description

Abstract (English)

The experiment was conducted in a quiet experimental room with an SR Research Eye-Link 1000 eyetracker desktop mount with a 35 mm lens, 13 point calibration and 1k sample rate and pacing interval. A game pad and keyboard were used to navigate in the experiment. Participants viewed the stimuli on a 21 in monitor 70 cm away from their eyes. They were instructed to blink normally and encouraged to take breaks 150 if needed. The experiment was programmed using the SR Research Experiment Builder software and the data was imported and preprocessed using the SR Research Experiment Viewer. Viewing was binocular but only the dominant eye, as determined prior to the experiment through the Miles method (Miles, 1930), was tracked (left eye for 18 participants). The experiment was preceded by three practice trials and each list began with three filler items. The eye-tracker was recalibrated before the exercise 155 and experiment and after breaks. Every trial was preceded by a drift correction screen, which tested whether a new calibration was necessary. The participants were instructed to fixate a white dot on a gray background. Once the participants fixated the fixation point for 1 second, the sentence appeared. If the participants failed to fixate the dot for 10 seconds, a calibration procedure was enforced. Once the fixation was successful, the sentence appeared written in white 160 letters on a dark gray background in the Lucida Sans Unicode font size 20 pt. Two characters corresponded roughly to one degree of visual angle. The first letter of the first word in the sentence was centered on the position of the fixation point on the previous screen. After they finished reading the sentence, the participants were instructed to fixate a white dot in the lower right corner of the screen for 1 second. If the participants read for longer than 20 seconds or failed to fixate 165 the white dot within that time, another calibration procedure was enforced. This second drift correction ensured that any loss of calibration during the reading of the sentence could be corrected before the next trial. The sentence presentation was occasionally followed by the question display. The participants used a game pad to answer the questions. In the practice feedback was provided, but not in the experimental trials. The participants had a time limit of 15 seconds to answer the questions, but the average answer time was 2 seconds. The experiment was divided into two parts, with an obligatory 2 minute break in between. The first half of the experiment consisted of the present study and the second half was an unrelated experiment. The experiment took 45 minutes on average.

Other

Research carried out in work package A01 of the SFB 833.