EYETRACKING READING LAB WEB PAGE

Welcome to the Trueswell Eyetracking Reading Lab, located in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

WHAT DO WE DO?

Dr. Trueswell's eyetracking reading lab is used to monitor eye movements as people silently read text. During reading, people's eyes stop to briefly fixate on individual words or pairs of words. These fixations last on the order of 1/4 to 1/2 of a second. The eye moves quite rapidly between fixations (these eye movements are called saccades), which last on the order of 20-30 msec (about 1/40th of a second). An example of actual eye fixations has been plotted below. The red numbers indicate the position of fixations, with the numbers indicating the exact sequence with which the fixations occurred.

We use eye fixation patterns as a measure of local processing difficulty with words or phrases (e.g., increased fixation times and regressive eye movements typically indicate that a reader is having difficulty with a particular region of text). From this measure, we can make certain inferences about the kinds of interpretations readers pursue, especially when they are faced with temporary uncertainties/ambiguities about the intended meaning of a word or phrase.

Language studies are also conducted using more standard measures of reaction time. For instance, the lab also conducts research using self-paced reading and cross-modal naming, cross-modal lexical decision, etc.

If you are interested in learning more about the research which Dr. Trueswell has conducted, take the time to visit our list of references.

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