THE RIGHT VISUAL-FIELD ADVANTAGE AND THE OPTIMAL VIEWING POSITION EFFECT - ON THE RELATION BETWEEN FOVEAL AND PARAFOVEAL WORD RECOGNITION

Recent developments on the optimal viewing position (OVP) effect sugge st that it may be caused by the same factors that underlie the right v isual field advantage in word recognition. This raises the question of the relationship between foveal and parafoveal word recognition. Thre e experiments are reported in which participants identified tachistosc opically presented words that were presented randomly in foveal and pa rafoveal vision. The results show that both the OVP effect and the rig ht visual field advantage for word recognition are part of a larger ex tended OVP curve that has the shape of a Gaussian distribution with th e mode shifted to the left of the center of the stimulus word. The shi ft of the distribution is a function of word length, but not of presen tation duration; it is also slightly moderated by the information valu e of word beginning and word end.