Parallel graded attention in reading: A pupillometric study

Abstract

There are roughly two lines of theory to account for recent evidence that word processing is influenced by adjacent orthographic information. One line assumes that multiple words can be processed simultaneously through a parallel graded distribution of visuo-spatial attention. The other line assumes that attention is strictly directed to single words, but that letter detectors are connected to both foveal and parafoveal feature detectors, as such driving parafoveal-foveal integrative effects. Putting these two accounts to the test, we build on recent research showing that the pupil responds to the brightness of covertly attended (i.e., without looking) locations in the visual field. Experiment 1 showed that foveal target word processing was facilitated by related parafoveal flanking words when these were positioned to the left and right of the target, but not when these were positioned above and below the target. Perfectly in line with this asymmetry, in Experiment 2 we found that the pupil size was contingent with the brightness of the locations of horizontally but not vertically aligned flankers, indicating that attentional resources were allocated to those words involved in the parafoveal-on-foveal effect. We conclude that orthographic parafoveal-on-foveal effects are driven by parallel graded attention.

Readers Are Parallel Processors

“…Influences from word n + 1 on n would provide stronger evidence for parallelism, as n + 1 could have an impact on n only if it were processed simultaneously. While such effects are not found at levels of semantic processing [12,14,15] (which, as we argue in this Opinion article, is for good reason), they are consistently found at the level of letter processing, with words being recognized faster when followed by an orthographically related word than an unrelated word [10][11][12][13]18].…”

“…Prior research has shown that the pupil size is contingent on the brightness of covertly attended (i.e., without looking) locations in the visual field [17]. Applying this principle in the flanker paradigm, it was found that the pupil size is contingent on the brightness of the locations of flanking words (with the overall display brightness kept equal) [18], indicating that during word processing a portion of attention is allocated to surrounding words.…”

“…However, it has since been established that parafoveal influences pertain not just to featural overlap but also to the relative position of letters (such that 'rock' is recognized faster in 'ro rock ck' than in 'or rock kc'), which indicates that orthographic processing (i.e., the encoding of the identities and positions of letters) occurs across multiple words in parallel [74,75]. It has further been shown that this process is driven by attention [18].…”

CHAP: Open-source software for processing and analyzing pupillometry data

“…6 for an example). By using this feature, the user can aggregate the data for analysis or for smoothing purposes (Diede & Bugg, 2017;Kang & Wheatley, 2015;Snell, Mathôt, Mirault, & Grainger, 2018). This option could also be useful in the case of comparing data collected using different eyetrackers or different sampling rates (Titz, Scholz, & Sedlmeier, 2018), or to correlate between pupil size and another measure, such as blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) activity (Murphy, O'Connell, O'Sullivan, Robertson, & Balsters, 2014b;Yellin, Berkovich-Ohana, & Malach, 2015).…”

“…5c). When the user uses this feature, the data are aligned to the onset of the first selected event (Kloosterman et al, 2015;Snell et al, 2018;Turi, Burr, & Binda, 2018). This alignment of the data is especially important when the event does not start at a fixed time (e.g., a stimulus appears after 2 s in some trials, and after 2.5 s in other trials).…”