Microsaccadic behavior when developing a complex dynamical activity

Abstract

Microsaccades are sensitive to changes of perceptual inputs as well as modulations of cognitive states. There are just a few works analyzing microsaccades while subjects are processing complex information and fewer when subjects make predictions about upcoming events. To evaluate whether contextual predictability might change microsaccadic behavior, microsaccades were evaluated for twenty-one subjects when reading 40 regular sentences and 40 proverbs. Maxjump was defined as the word with the largest difference between the cloze predictability of two consecutive words. Analysis of microsaccades while reading proverbs and regular sentences revealed that microsaccadic rate on words before Maxjump, during Maxjump and words after Maxjump varied depending on the kind of sentence and on the word predictability. Words of low and high predictability required either less or more microsaccades to previous words, during and on Maxjump, depending upon the semantic context and a readers' predictions of upcoming words. The present study demonstrates that the rate of microsaccades showed significant differences for reading either proverbs or regular sentences. Hence, evaluation of microsaccades while reading sentences with different contextual predictability may provide information concerning specific effects of cue attention during a complex task.

Keywords

• |microsaccade|reading|proverbs|attentional cue|predictions