The Adaptive Nature of Eye Movements in Linguistic Tasks: How Payoff and Architecture Shape Speed‐Accuracy Trade‐Offs

Lewis, Richard L.; Shvartsman, Michael; Singh, Satinder

doi:10.1111/tops.12032

“… 4 This paradigm in some ways resembles a List Lexical Decision Task (LLDT), in which six four-letter words are presented simultaneously and the participant's task is to decide whether any nonwords appear in the set (Lewis, Shvartsman & Singh, 2013). However, the LLDT differs from cumulative LDT because in LLDT, lists contain at most one nonword, and key-press responses may be indicated as soon as a nonword has been detected.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

It takes time to prime: Semantic priming in the ocular lexical decision task.

Hoedemaker

¹

,

Gordon

²

2014

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted in which the manual response mode typically used in lexical decision tasks (LDT) was replaced with an eye-movement response through a sequence of three words. This ocular LDT combines the explicit control of task goals found in LDTs with the highly practiced ocular response used in reading text. In Experiment 1, forward saccades indicated an affirmative LD on each word in the triplet. In Experiment 2, LD responses were delayed until all three letter strings had been read. The goal of the study was to evaluate the contribution of task goals and response mode to semantic priming. Semantic priming is very robust in tasks that involve recognition of words in isolation, such as LDT, while limited during text reading as measured using eye movements. Gaze durations in both experiments showed robust semantic priming even though ocular response times were much shorter than manual LDs for the same words in the English Lexicon Project. Ex-Gaussian distribution fits revealed that the priming effect was concentrated in estimates of τ, meaning that priming was most pronounced in the slow tail of the distribution. This pattern shows differential use of the prime information, which may be more heavily recruited in cases where the LD is difficult as indicated by longer response times. Compared to the manual LD responses, ocular LDs provide a more sensitive measure of this task-related influence on word recognition as measured by the LDT.

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“…First, we assessed differences in word recognition times between the cumulative LDT, the ocular LDT (Experiment 1) and the manual LDT (ELP). We expected gaze duration on the 4 This paradigm in some ways resembles a List Lexical Decision Task (LLDT), in which six four-letter words are presented simultaneously and the participant's task is to decide whether any nonwords appear in the set (Lewis, Shvartsman & Singh, 2013). However, the LLDT differs from cumulative LDT because in LLDT, lists contain at most one nonword, and key-press responses may be indicated as soon as a nonword has been detected.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

It Takes Time to Prime: Semantic Priming in the Ocular Lexical Decision Task

Hoedemaker

¹

,

Gordon

²

2014

PsycEXTRA Dataset

1

0

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Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted in which the manual response mode typically used in lexical decision tasks (LDT) was replaced with an eye-movement response through a sequence of three words. This ocular LDT combines the explicit control of task goals found in LDTs with the highly practiced ocular response used in reading text. In Experiment 1, forward saccades indicated an affirmative LD on each word in the triplet. In Experiment 2, LD responses were delayed until all three letter strings had been read. The goal of the study was to evaluate the contribution of task goals and response mode to semantic priming. Semantic priming is very robust in tasks that involve recognition of words in isolation, such as LDT, while limited during text reading as measured using eye movements. Gaze durations in both experiments showed robust semantic priming even though ocular response times were much shorter than manual LDs for the same words in the English Lexicon Project. Ex-Gaussian distribution fits revealed that the priming effect was concentrated in estimates of τ, meaning that priming was most pronounced in the slow tail of the distribution. This pattern shows differential use of the prime information, which may be more heavily recruited in cases where the LD is difficult as indicated by longer response times. Compared to the manual LD responses, ocular LDs provide a more sensitive measure of this task-related influence on word recognition as measured by the LDT.Keywords semantic priming; goal-driven processing; response time distributions; lexical decision; eye tracking during word reading Isolated word recognition tasks are an extremely popular tool for studying language at all levels of processing. In particular, the lexical decision task (LDT) (Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971;Rubenstein, Garfield & Millikan, 1970), has become a staple of psycholinguistic research. In addition to its steady growth in popularity as evidence in psychological research, applications now include several mega-studies, such as the English Lexicon Project (ELP) (Balota, et al., 2007) and the Groot Nationaal Onderzoek Taal organized across Flanders and The Netherlands (Brysbaert, Keuleers, Mandera & Stevens, 2013). Studies of the recognition of words presented in isolation and during text reading have yielded highly consistent evidence about many facets of word recognition (Schilling, Rayner Address correspondence to: Peter C. Gordon, Department of Psychology, CB#3270, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3270, pcg@unc.edu. & Chumbley, 1998), suggesting there is a substantial amount of overlap between the processes required for successful performance on isolated word recognition tasks and the reading of text for comprehension. However, differences in the specific demands made by each task require more detailed understanding before evidence from isolated word recognition studies can be used directly to improve our understanding of word recognition during text reading. NIH Public AccessLike other tasks...

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“…Our new model extends the one presented in Lewis et al (2013) to include a noisy memory that buffers perceptual input. We develop it in the context of the LLDT, but its essential elements are not tied to this task.…”

Section: A Model Of Saccadic Control With Noisy Memory For Recent Permentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We evaluated our model in the LLDT, under the balanced payoff presented in Lewis et al (2013), the same Normalized spillover effect in model (vs. memory noise) and human participants. We define normalized spillover as the ratio of the spillover (word n−1 ) frequency effect size to the foveal (word n ) frequency effect size; this normalizes against scale differences between high and low noise architectures.…”

Section: A Computational Rationality Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We seek to develop a model that can explain such variation in eye-movement behavior as a rational adaptation to the task (including utility) and the internal oculomotor and cognitive architecture (Lewis et al, 2013). Such a model would permit a computational rationality analysis (Lewis et al, to appear) because the problem of rational behavior is defined in part by the bounded mechanisms of the posited computational architecture.…”

Section: Introduction and Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Computationally Rational Saccadic Control: An Explanation of Spillover Effects Based on Sampling from Noisy Perception and Memory

Shvartsman

¹

,

Lewis

²

,

Singh

³

2014

Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics

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Eye-movements in reading exhibit frequency spillover effects: fixation durations on a word are affected by the frequency of the previous word. We explore the idea that this effect may be an emergent property of a computationally rational eyemovement strategy that is navigating a tradeoff between processing immediate perceptual input, and continued processing of past input based on memory. We present an adaptive eye-movement control model with a minimal capacity for such processing, based on a composition of thresholded sequential samplers that integrate information from noisy perception and noisy memory. The model is applied to the List Lexical Decision Task and shown to yield frequency spillover-a robust property of human eye-movements in this task, even with parafoveal masking. We show that spillover in the model emerges in approximately optimal control policies that sometimes process memory rather than perception. We compare this model with one that is able to give priority to perception over memory, and show that the perception-priority policies in such a model do not perform as well in a range of plausible noise settings. We explain how the frequency spillover arises from a counter-intuitive but fundamental property of sequenced thresholded samplers.

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The Adaptive Nature of Eye Movements in Linguistic Tasks: How Payoff and Architecture Shape Speed‐Accuracy Trade‐Offs

Cited by 21 publications

References 45 publications

It takes time to prime: Semantic priming in the ocular lexical decision task.

It takes time to prime: Semantic priming in the ocular lexical decision task.

It Takes Time to Prime: Semantic Priming in the Ocular Lexical Decision Task

Computationally Rational Saccadic Control: An Explanation of Spillover Effects Based on Sampling from Noisy Perception and Memory

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