The role of eye movements in the missing-letter effect revisited with the rapid serial visual presentation procedure.

Abstract

When participants read a text while searching for a target letter, they are more likely to miss the target letter embedded in frequent function words than in less frequent content words. This effect is usually observed with a text displayed normally, for which it has been found that frequent function words are fixated for a smaller amount of time than less frequent content words. However, similar pattern of omissions have been observed with a rapid serial visual presentation procedure in which words appear one at a time. These parallel results would demonstrate that fixation duration per se is not the proximal cause of the missing-letter effect only if eye movements are not made during the rapid serial visual presentation procedure. Therefore, the authors performed eye monitoring during the rapid serial visual presentation procedure. Results revealed that, with a rapid serial visual presentation procedure, participants fixated function and content words for almost the entire presentation duration. It is concluded that eye movements are not the proximal cause of the missing-letter effect.

Sex differences in the missing-letter effect: A question of reading or visual–spatial skills?

“…In addition, Experiment 2 reveals that the critical factor is reading speed on the text used for the letter search task, and not reading speed in general. As such, the present results are in line with previous studies in which reading speed was experimentally manipulated with a rapid serial visual presentation procedure (Saint-Aubin & Klein, 2001;Saint-Aubin et al, 2010). In these studies, the size of the missing-letter effect increased with reading speed.…”

“…With an RSVP procedure, a large missing-letter effect can be obtained and the effect is virtually identical to the missing-letter effect observed with a paper and pencil procedure (Saint-Aubin & Klein, 2004). Most interestingly, the overall omission rate and the size of the missing-letter effect increases as a function of reading speed, because omission rates increase faster for function than for content words (Healy, Oliver, & McNamara, 1987;Saint-Aubin, Kenny, & Roy-Charland, 2010;Saint-Aubin & Klein, 2001).…”

The role of awareness in anticipation and recall performance in the Hebb repetition paradigm: implications for sequence learning

“…Fine-grained measures traditionally reveal effects that are otherwise not visible (see, e.g., Emmorey, Luk, Pyers, & Bialystok, 2008;MacLeod & Hodder, 1998;Saint-Aubin, Kenny, & Roy-Charland, 2010). In this study, however, the recall performance shows a gradient of improvement that is not apparent from the anticipation data.…”

Mind wandering in text comprehension under dual-task conditions

“…Similar to logistic regression techniques, this approach is immune to the types of scaling artifacts that arise in the analysis of proportion correct (Everitt, 2001; Dixon, 2008). In some previous research on the missing-letter effect, an interaction with the magnitude of the effect was obtained largely because the manipulation affected the overall level of performance, and the magnitude of the missing-letter effect may have been influenced by such scaling effects (e.g., Saint-Aubin et al, 2010). …”