What Eye Movements Reveal About Later Comprehension of Long Connected Texts.
Cogn Sci
; 44(10): e12905, 2020 10.
Article
em En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-33029808
ABSTRACT
We know that reading involves coordination between textual characteristics and visual attention, but research linking eye movements during reading and comprehension assessed after reading is surprisingly limited, especially for reading long connected texts. We tested two competing possibilities (a) the weak association hypothesis:
Links between eye movements and comprehension are weak and short-lived, versus (b) the strong associationhypothesis:
The two are robustly linked, even after a delay. Using a predictive modeling approach, we trained regression models to predict comprehension scores from global eye movement features, using participant-level cross-validation to ensure that the models generalize across participants. We used data from three studies in which readers (Ns = 104, 130, 147) answered multiple-choice comprehension questions ~30 min after reading a 6,500-word text, or after reading up to eight 1,000-word texts. The models generated accurate predictions of participants' text comprehension scores (correlations between observed and predicted comprehension 0.384, 0.362, 0.372, ps < .001), in line with the strong association hypothesis. We found that making more, but shorter fixations, consistently predicted comprehension across all studies. Furthermore, models trained on one study's data could successfully predict comprehension on the others, suggesting generalizability across studies. Collectively, these findings suggest that there is a robust link between eye movements and subsequent comprehension of a long connected text, thereby connecting theories of low-level eye movements with those of higher order text processing during reading.Palavras-chave
Texto completo:
1
Coleções:
01-internacional
Base de dados:
MEDLINE
Assunto principal:
Leitura
/
Compreensão
/
Movimentos Oculares
Tipo de estudo:
Prognostic_studies
Limite:
Adult
/
Female
/
Humans
/
Male
Idioma:
En
Ano de publicação:
2020
Tipo de documento:
Article