The 35th Sir Frederick Bartlett Lecture: Eye movements and attention in reading, scene perception, and visual search

TLDR

Eye movements are now widely used to investigate cognitive processes during reading, scene perception, and visual search. The article reviews key eye‑movement topics—perceptual span, preview benefit, control mechanisms, and computational models—alongside related issues in scene perception and visual search. The review concludes that eye‑movement research in reading is more advanced than in scene perception and visual search, and that reading paradigms, including real‑world and visual‑world approaches, should be more widely applied to those domains.

Abstract

Eye movements are now widely used to investigate cognitive processes during reading, scene perception, and visual search. In this article, research on the following topics is reviewed with respect to reading: (a) the perceptual span (or span of effective vision), (b) preview benefit, (c) eye movement control, and (d) models of eye movements. Related issues with respect to eye movements during scene perception and visual search are also reviewed. It is argued that research on eye movements during reading has been somewhat advanced over research on eye movements in scene perception and visual search and that some of the paradigms developed to study reading should be more widely adopted in the study of scene perception and visual search. Research dealing with "real-world" tasks and research utilizing the visual-world paradigm are also briefly discussed.