Takes place in LT5

Eye movements during text processing and multiline reading: New challenges and opportunities for insights

Symposium Organisers: The Reading Research Group, Bournemouth University.

For over a half century, the study of reading has been greatly enhanced through the recording and analysis of readers’ eye movements. However, even though most reading situations involve texts with multiple lines, eye movement reading research has been dominated by single line reading studies. Investigation of text processing can provide insights into language comprehension and inferencing that more closely map the complexity of the everyday cognitive tasks. This symposium will present research that attempts to provide such insights and tackle the challenges of multiline reading experimentation.

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Eye-tracking and the visual arts

Symposium Organiser: Anna Miscenà (Universität Wien)

The experience of art has always defied quantification: not all forms of art are tangible, the meaning of art is understood as subjective, its value is often unpredictable. Hence the study of art and of its perception is often descriptive, interpretative, and theoretical.

Nonetheless, in recent time, the study of art has changed to include tools of empirical and quantitative investigation. Among these, eye-tracking has enabled us to tackle questions which have long been central in the fields of art history and aesthetics. Some of these questions concern art itself: which elements of a painting gather our attention? Do composition, style, colour, affect eye-movements?  Other questions concern us, the spectators, and the context in which art is found: can we monitor differences between groups of viewers? How do curatorial choices shape the viewing experience?

In this Symposium, researchers with backgrounds in museology, art history, sociology and computer science begin to answer some of these questions, using eye-movements as a tool to gain innovative insights in the visual experience of art. By presenting a selection of recent studies, this Symposium aims to spark a debate on the methodological implications of studying art and its perception quantitatively and empirically. 

Take place in LT5

Unstable fixation and nystagmus with a focus on the next generation of researchers

Symposium Organisers: Frank A. Proudlock (University of Leicester), Mervyn G. Thomas (University of Leicester), Jonathan T. Erichsen (Cardiff University)

This symposium aims to better understand the continuum of abnormal fixational eye movements, from unstable gaze in paediatric eye diseases up to more overt involuntary oscillations of the eyes in the form of nystagmus.

The session summarises the effects of unstable fixation and nystagmus on spatial and temporal aspects of functional vision. The symposium will also review the structural anomalies associated with disrupted foveal development, especially in relation to genetic causes of nystagmus and outline the impact of eye oscillations on clinical electrophysiological testing of underlying retinal abnormalities.

The session has been designed to provide an opportunity for an up-and-coming generation of researchers in the field of unstable fixation and nystagmus to present their work.

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Eye movements as a measure of higher-level text processing

Symposium Organisers: Jana Lüdtke (Freie Universität Berlin) & Mesian Tilmatine (Freie Universität Berlin)

Discourse as a core aspect of human cognition remains understudied in cognitive sciences (Mar, 2018). The use of eye-tracking technologies bears considerable potential for research on higher-level comprehension of written language (Cook & Wei, 2019). Consequently, there has been a trend in the past years to conduct more studies on higher-level processing of texts with a natural narrative flow, be that in the form of poetry, prose, or even newspaper articles. In this symposium, we will discuss our most recent contributions to this trend, mostly in the form of experimental data and improved or new models.

There are reasons why naturalistic texts are traditionally less prominent in eye-tracking research, mostly related to stimulus complexity. The symposium will thus review possible approaches to the methodological challenges associated with the use of naturalistic text stimuli. In that context, the talks will particularly focus on the role of individual differences in narrative and poetic perception (cf. Mak & Willems, 2019; Graf & Landwehr, 2015; Harash, 2021), as well as on possible ways to measure reading-related cognitive processes like mental simulation, mind-wandering, immersion, and foregrounding.

Takes place in LT5

The role of eye movements in memory processes: between working memory and long-term memory

Organiser: Shlomit Yuval-Greenberg (Tel Aviv University)

From the day we are born and until our death we are constantly engaged in exploration of our ever-changing environment. In the continuous process of visual exploration, our eye movements play a critical role as they repeatedly shift the center of gaze towards locations of interest. However, eye movements are not only driven by the physical presence of stimulation, but also by internal representations of stimuli that are not physically present. Such internally-driven eye movements are thought to play a key role in memory processes at both shorter- and longer-term time scales. This symposium will bring together scholars studying different types of eye movements, including saccades, microsaccades and smooth pursuit,  in both working memory and episodic long-term memory tasks. The first three talks will focus on working memory and discuss how different types of eye movements can be used as windows into working memory processes. The next three talks will focus on episodic memory and examine the dynamics of gaze during encoding and retrieval and their neural correlates. The goal of this symposium is to lead to a discussion comparing the various types of eye movements and their roles in short and long-term memory.

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Takes place in LT5

Symposium to honour Alexander Pollatsek’s legacy to eye movement research

Symposium Organiser: Jukka Hyona (University of Turku)

This symposium pays tribute to Alexander Pollatsek’s legacy and contribution to eye movement research. He belongs to the pioneers on whose shoulders we have been able to stand when designing our own studies and making our own contributions. He has been instrumental in putting forth formal models of eye movements in reading, both for alphabetic and logographic script (see Li’s presentation). He has also published highly influential studies on the activation of the phonological code and orthographic neighbours (see Perea’s presentation) during word recognition in reading, as well as on the recognition of compound and other morphologically complex words (see Hyönä’s and Liversedge’s presentations). Sandy also successfully applied the eye-tracking method to study visual cognition, particularly object and scene perception (see Castelhano’s presentation). Finally, his statistical expertise is widely appreciated (see Drieghe’s presentation). In the proposed symposium, we pay tribute to different aspects of his research.

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Takes place in LT5