EYE-MOVEMENT CONTROL DURING READING - A SIMULATION OF SOME WORD-TARGETING STRATEGIES

McConkie, Kerr, Reddix, & Zola [(1988), Vision Research, 28, 1107-1118 ] demonstrated that the distributions of landing sites on a word tende d to be gaussian in shape, They provided a detailed account of the beh aviour of the eye once a target had been selected and a saccade initia ted, but said little about the process of target selection itself, The purpose of this study was to take as a starting point the landing sit e distributions of McConkie ct al., in particular the residuals derive d from fitting the gaussians to the empirical data, and to explore by computer simulation a number of saccade targeting strategies in order to discover candidates that best accounted for the residual data, Our results indicate that the strategy that gives the best fit involves ta rgeting the longest word in a right parafoveal window extending 20 cha racters to the right of the currently fixated word, The implications o f this finding for models of reading are discussed. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd.