ATTENTION DEMANDS DURING READING AND THE OCCURRENCE OF BRIEF (EXPRESS) FIXATIONS

Eye movements were recorded while subjects read passages of text repea tedly (Experiment 1) and while normal text and strings of homogeneous letters were fixated (Experiment 2). Text repetition decreased fixatio n durations and increased saccade size, presumably because it decrease d attention demands. Irrespective of repetition, however, no distinct distribution of brief (express) fixations emerged. In Experiment 2, fi xation durations were shorter and saccades were larger when strings of homogeneous letters were ''read,'' indicating that this condition dec reased attention demands. Again, however, no distinct distribution of express fixations emerged. These findings pose problems for the view t hat attentional processes determine the occurrence of brief (express) fixation durations in reading. Supplementary analyses of Experiments 1 and 2 suggested that visuospatial processing affected fixation durati ons, irrespective of linguistic processing demands.