Existing research shows that the order in which evidence arrives can bias its evaluation and the resulting decision in favor of information encountered early on. We used eye-tracking to study the underlying cognitive mechanisms in the context of incentivized financial choices based on real world market data. Subjects learned about the…

Attribute amnesia (Chen & Wyble, 2015, 2016) demonstrates that we may not always be able to spontaneously retrieve a simple attribute of a visual object (e.g., its color) for conscious report, even though the object had just been the target in a visual task. Attribute amnesia has been suggested to reflect a lack of consolidation of the…

Do negative quantifiers like "few" reduce people's ability to rapidly evaluate incoming language with respect to world knowledge? Previous research has addressed this question by examining whether online measures of quantifier comprehension match the "final" interpretation reflected in verification judgments. However, these…

Despite the well-known influence of emotional meaning on cognition, relatively less is known about its effects on reading behavior. We investigated whether fixation behavior during the reading of Chinese sentences is influenced by emotional word meaning in the parafovea. Two-character target words embedded into the same sentence frames provided…

Two very reliable influences on eye fixation durations in reading are word frequency, as measured by corpus counts, and word predictability, as measured by cloze norming. Several studies have reported strictly additive effects of these 2 variables. Predictability also reliably influences the amplitude of the N400 component in event-related…

Readers tend to skip words, particularly when they are short, frequent, or predictable. Angele and Rayner (2013) recently reported that readers are often unable to detect syntactic anomalies in parafoveal vision. In the present study, we manipulated target word predictability to assess whether contextual constraint modulates…

We assessed the extent to which previous experience of joint gaze with people (i.e., looking toward the same object) modulates later gaze cueing of attention elicited by those individuals. Participants in Experiments 1 and 2a/b first completed a saccade/antisaccade task while a to-be-ignored face either looked at, or away from, the participants'…

In two experiments we investigated the relationship between eye movements and performance in visual search tasks of varying difficulty. Experiment 1 provided evidence that a single process is used for search among static and moving items. Moreover, we estimated the functional visual field (FVF) from the gaze coordinates and found that its size…

Reading fluency is often predicted by rapid automatized naming (RAN) speed, which as the name implies, measures the automaticity with which familiar stimuli (e.g., letters) can be retrieved and named. Readers with dyslexia are considered to have less "automatized" access to lexical information, reflected in longer RAN times compared with…

Participants' eye movements were tracked when reading sentences in which target word predictability was manipulated to being unpredictable from the preceding context, predictable from the sentence preceding the one in which the target word was embedded, or predictable from the adjective directly preceding the target word. Results show that there…

A controversial issue in anaphoric processing has been whether processing preferences of anaphoric expressions are affected by the antecedent's grammatical role or surface position. Using eye tracking, Experiment 1 examined the comprehension of pronouns during reading, which revealed shorter reading times in the pronoun region and later regions…

The present study used the stimulus onset delay paradigm to investigate eye movement control in reading and in scene viewing in a within-participants design. Short onset delays (0, 25, 50, 200, and 350 ms) were chosen to simulate the type of natural processing difficulty encountered in reading and scene viewing. Fixation duration increased…

The present study investigated whether the recognition of spoken words is influenced by how predictable they are given their syntactic context and whether listeners assign more weight to syntactic predictability when acoustic-phonetic information is less reliable. Syntactic predictability was manipulated by varying the word order of past…

One of the words that readers of English skip most often is the definite article "the". Most accounts of reading assume that in order for a reader to skip a word, it must have received some lexical processing. The definite article is skipped so regularly, however, that the oculomotor system might have learned to skip the letter string…

Statements of the form if… then… can be used to communicate conditional speech acts such as tips and promises. Conditional promises require the speaker to have perceived control over the outcome event, whereas conditional tips do not. In an eye-tracking study, we examined whether readers are sensitive to information about perceived speaker control…