Developmental Eye-Tracking Publications
All EyeLink eye tracker developmental research publications (infants / children / aging) up until 2025 (with some early 2026s) are listed below by year. You can search the eye-tracking research publications using keywords such as Infant, Reading, Word Recognition, etc. You can also search for individual author names. If we missed any EyeLink developmental articles, please email us!
2008 |
Michael Schneider; Angela Heine; Verena Thaler; Joke Torbeyns; Bert De Smedt; Lieven Verschaffel; Arthur M. Jacobs; Elsbeth Stern A validation of eye movements as a measure of elementary school children's developing number sense Journal Article In: Cognitive Development, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 409–422, 2008. @article{schneider2008validation,The number line estimation task captures central aspects of children's developing number sense, that is, their intuitions for numbers and their interrelations. Previous research used children's answer patterns and verbal reports as evidence of how they solve this task. In the present study we investigated to what extent eye movements recorded during task solution reflect children's use of the number line. By means of a cross-sectional design with 66 children from Grades 1, 2, and 3, we show that eye-tracking data (a) reflect grade-related increase in estimation competence, (b) are correlated with the accuracy of manual answers, (c) relate, in Grade 2, to children's addition competence, (d) are systematically distributed over the number line, and (e) replicate previous findings concerning children's use of counting strategies and orientation-point strategies. These findings demonstrate the validity and utility of eye-tracking data for investigating children's developing number sense and estimation competence. |
Menno Van Der Schoot; Alain L. Vasbinder; Tako M. Horsley; Ernest C. D. M. Van Lieshout The role of two reading strategies in text comprehension: An eye fixation study in primary school children Journal Article In: Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 203–223, 2008. @article{VanDerSchoot2008,This study examined whether 1012-year-old children use two reading strategies to aid their text comprehension: (1) distinguishing between important and unimportant words; and (2) resolving anaphoric references. Of interest was the question to what extent use of these reading strategies was predictive of reading comprehension skill over and above decoding skill and vocabulary. Reading strategy use was examined by the recording of eye fixations on specific target words. In contrast to less successful comprehenders, more successful comprehenders invested more processing time in important than in unimportant words. On the other hand, they needed less time to determine the antecedent of an anaphor. The results suggest that more successful comprehenders build a more effective mental model of the text than less successful comprehenders in at least two ways. First, they allocate more attention to the incorporation of goal-relevant than goal-irrelevant information into the model. Second, they ascertain that the text model is coherent and richly connected. |
2007 |
Ensar Becic; Arthur F. Kramer; Walter R. Boot Age-related differences in the use of background layout in visual search Journal Article In: Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 109–125, 2007. @article{Becic2007,The effect of background layout on visual search performance, and more specifically on the tendency to refixate previously inspected locations and objects, was investigated. Older and younger adults performed a search task in which a background layout or landmark was present or absent in a gaze contingent visual search paradigm. Regardless of age, participants demonstrated fewer refixations when landmarks were present, with older adults showing a larger landmark advantage. This visual search advantage did not come at the cost of saccadic latency. Furthermore, the visual search performance advantage obtained in the presence of a background layout or landmark was observed both for individuals with small and large memory spans. |
Eva Belke; Antje S. Meyer Single and multiple object naming in healthy ageing Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 22, no. 8, pp. 1178–1211, 2007. @article{Belke2007,We compared the performance of young (college-aged) and older (50'years) speakers in a single object and a multiple object naming task and assessed their susceptibility to semantic and phonological context effects when producing words amidst semantically or phonologically similar or dissimilar words. In single object naming, there were no performance differences between the age groups. In multiple object naming, we observed significant age-related slowing, expressed in longer gazes to the objects and slower speech. In addition, the direction of the phonological context effects differed for the two groups. The results of a supplementary experiment showed that young speakers, when adopting a slow speech rate, coordinated their eye movements and speech differently from the older speakers. Our results imply that age-related slowing in connected speech is not a direct consequence of a slowing of lexical retrieval processes. Instead, older speakers might allocate more processing capacity to speech monitoring processes, which would slow down their concurrent speech planning processes. |
Lisa R. Betts; Allison B. Sekuler; Patrick J. Bennett The effects of aging on orientation discrimination Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 47, no. 13, pp. 1769–1780, 2007. @article{Betts2007,The current experiments measured orientation discrimination thresholds in younger (mean age ≈ 23 years) and older (mean age ≈ 66 years) subjects. In Experiment 1, the contrast needed to discriminate Gabor patterns (0.75, 1.5, and 3 c/deg) that differed in orientation by 12 deg was measured for different levels of external noise. At all three spatial frequencies, discrimination thresholds were significantly higher in older than younger subjects when external noise was low, but not when external noise was high. In Experiment 2, discrimination thresholds were measured as a function of stimulus contrast by varying orientation while contrast was fixed. The resulting threshold-vs-contrast curves had very similar shapes in the two age groups, although the curve obtained from older subjects was shifted to slightly higher contrasts. At contrasts greater than 0.05, thresholds in both older and younger subjects were approximately constant at 0.5 deg. The results from Experiments 1 and 2 suggest that age differences in orientation discrimination are due solely to differences in equivalent input noise. Using the same methods as Experiment 1, Experiment 3 measured thresholds in 6 younger observers as a function of external noise and retinal illuminance. Although reducing retinal illumination increased equivalent input noise, the effect was much smaller than the age difference found in Experiment 1. Therefore, it is unlikely that differences in orientation discrimination were due solely to differences in retinal illumination. Our findings are consistent with recent physiological experiments that have found elevated spontaneous activity and reduced orientation tuning on visual cortical neurons in senescent cats (Hua, T., Li, X., He, L., Zhou, Y., Wang, Y., Leventhal, A. G. (206). Functional degradation of visual cortical cells in old cats. |
Géry D'Ydewalle; Wim De Bruycker Eye movements of children and adults while reading television subtitles Journal Article In: European Psychologist, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 196–205, 2007. @article{DYdewalle2007,Eye movements of children (Grade 5–6) and adults were monitored while they were watching a foreign language movie with either standard (foreign language soundtrack and native language subtitling) or reversed (foreign language subtitles and native language soundtrack) subtitling. With standard subtitling, reading behavior in the subtitle was observed, but there was a difference between one- and two-line subtitles. As two lines of text contain verbal information that cannot easily be inferred from the pictures on the screen, more regular reading occurred; a single text line is often redundant to the information in the picture, and accordingly less reading of one-line text was apparent. Reversed subtitling showed even more irregular reading patterns (e.g., more subtitles skipped, fewer fixations, longer latencies). No substantial age differences emerged, except that children took longer to shift attention to the subtitle at its onset, and showed longer fixations and shorter saccades in the text. On the whole, the results demonstrated the flexibility of the attentional system and its tuning to the several information sources available (image, soundtrack, and subtitles). |
Alison Firestone; Nicholas B. Turk-Browne; Jennifer D. Ryan Age-related deficits in face recognition are related to underlying changes in scanning behavior Journal Article In: Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, vol. 14, no. 6, pp. 594–607, 2007. @article{Firestone2007,Previous studies demonstrating age-related impairments in recognition memory for faces are suggestive of underlying differences in face processing. To study these differ-ences, we monitored eye movements while younger and older adults viewed younger and older faces. Compared to the younger group, older adults showed increased sampling of facial features, and more transitions. However, their scanning behavior was most similar to the younger group when looking at older faces. Moreover, while older adults exhibited worse recognition memory than younger adults overall, their memory was more accurate for older faces. These findings suggest that age-related differences in recognition memory for faces may be related to changes in scanning behavior, and that older adults may use social group status as a compensatory processing strategy. |
Chloé Prado; Matthieu Dubois; Sylviane Valdois The eye movements of dyslexic children during reading and visual search: Impact of the visual attention span Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 47, no. 19, pp. 2521–2530, 2007. @article{Prado2007,The eye movements of 14 French dyslexic children having a VA span reduction and 14 normal readers were compared in two tasks of visual search and text reading. The dyslexic participants made a higher number of rightward fixations in reading only. They simultaneously processed the same low number of letters in both tasks whereas normal readers processed far more letters in reading. Importantly, the children's VA span abilities related to the number of letters simultaneously processed in reading. The atypical eye movements of some dyslexic readers in reading thus appear to reflect difficulties to increase their VA span according to the task request. |
Annie Roy-Charland; Jean Saint-Aubin; Mary Ann Evans Eye movements in shared book reading with children from kindergarten to Grade 4 Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 20, no. 9, pp. 909–931, 2007. @article{roycharland2007eye,Previous studies have revealed that preschool-age children who are not yet readers pay little attention to written text in a shared book reading situation (see Evans & Saint-Aubin, 2005). The current study was aimed at investigating the constancy of these results across reading development, by monitoring eye movements in shared book reading, for children from kindergarten to Grade 4. Children were read books of three difficulty levels. The results revealed a higher proportion of time, a higher proportion of landing positions, and a higher proportion of reading-like saccades on the text as grade level increased and as reading skills improved. More precisely, there was a link between the difficulty of the material and attention to text. Children spent more time on a text that was within their reading abilities than when the book difficulty exceeded their reading skills. |
Jennifer D. Ryan; Grace Leung; Nicholas B. Turk-Browne; Lynn Hasher Assessment of age-related changes in inhibition and binding using eye movement monitoring Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 239–250, 2007. @article{ryan2007assessment,Age-related memory deficits may result from attending to too much information (inhibition deficit) and/or storing too little information (binding deficit). The present study evaluated the inhibition and binding accounts by exploiting a situation in which deficits of inhibition should benefit relational memory binding. Older adults directed more viewing toward abrupt onsets in scenes compared with younger adults under instructions to ignore any such onsets, providing evidence for age-related inhibitory deficits, which were ameliorated with additional practice. Subsequently, objects that served as abrupt onsets underwent changes in their spatial relations. Despite successful inhibition of the onsets, eye movements of younger adults were attracted to manipulated objects. In contrast, the eye movements of older adults, who directed more viewing to the late onsets compared with younger adults, were not attracted toward manipulated regions. Similar differences between younger and older adults in viewing of manipulated regions were observed under free viewing conditions. These findings provide evidence for concurrent inhibition and binding deficits in older adults and demonstrate that age-related declines in inhibitory processing do not lead to enhanced relational memory for extraneous information. |
Susan Sullivan; Ted Ruffman; Samuel B. Hutton Age differences in emotion recognition skills and the visual scanning of emotion faces Journal Article In: Journals of Gerontology - Series B Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, vol. 62, no. 1, pp. 53–60, 2007. @article{Sullivan2007,Research suggests that a person's emotion recognition declines with advancing years. We examined whether or not this age-related decline was attributable to a tendency to overlook emotion information in the eyes. In Experiment 1, younger adults were significantly better than older adults at inferring emotions from full faces and eyes, though not from mouths. Using an eye tracker in Experiment 2, we found young adults, in comparison with older adults, to have superior emotion recognition performance and to look proportionately more to eyes than mouths. However, although better emotion recognition performance was significantly correlated with more eye looking in younger adults, the same was not true in older adults. We discuss these results in terms of brain changes with age. |
Corinne Tremblay; François Champoux; Patrice Voss; Benoit A. Bacon; Franco Lepore; Hugo Théoret Speech and non-speech audio-visual illusions: A developmental study Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 2, no. 8, pp. e742, 2007. @article{Tremblay2007,It is well known that simultaneous presentation of incongruent audio and visual stimuli can lead to illusory percepts. Recent data suggest that distinct processes underlie non-specific intersensory speech as opposed to non-speech perception. However, the development of both speech and non-speech intersensory perception across childhood and adolescence remains poorly defined. Thirty-eight observers aged 5 to 19 were tested on the McGurk effect (an audio-visual illusion involving speech), the Illusory Flash effect and the Fusion effect (two audio-visual illusions not involving speech) to investigate the development of audio-visual interactions and contrast speech vs. non-speech developmental patterns. Whereas the strength of audio-visual speech illusions varied as a direct function of maturational level, performance on non-speech illusory tasks appeared to be homogeneous across all ages. These data support the existence of independent maturational processes underlying speech and non-speech audio-visual illusory effects. |
Stefan Van der Stigchel; N. N. J. Rommelse; J. -B. Deijen; C. J. A. Geldof; J. Witlox; Jaap Oosterlaan; J. A. Sergeant; Jan Theeuwes Oculomotor capture in ADHD Journal Article In: Cognitive Neuropsychology, vol. 24, no. 5, pp. 535–549, 2007. @article{VanderStigchel2007c,It is generally thought that deficits in response inhibition form an important area of dysfunction in patients with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, recent research using visual search paradigms seems to suggest that these inhibitory deficits do not extend towards inhibiting irrelevant distractors. Using an oculomotor capture task, the present study investigated whether boys with ADHD and their nonaffected brothers are impaired in suppressing reflexive eye movements to a task-irrelevant onset distractor. Results showed that boys with ADHD had slower responses than controls, but were as accurate in their eye movements as controls. Nonaffected brothers showed similar problems in the speed of responding as their affected brothers, which might suggest that this deficit relates to a familial risk for developing the disorder. Importantly, all three groups were equally captured by the distractor, which shows that boys with ADHD and their brothers are not more distracted by the distractor than are controls. Saccade latency and the proportion of intrusive saccades were related to continuous dimensions of ADHD symptoms, which suggests that these deficits are not simply present or absent, but rather indicate that the severity of these deficits relate to the severity of ADHD. The finding that boys with ADHD (and their nonaffected brothers) did not have problems inhibiting irrelevant distractors contradicts a general response inhibition deficiency in ADHD, which may be explained by the relatively independency of working memory in this type of response inhibition. |
2006 |
Meredyth Daneman; Brenda Hannon; Christine Burton Are There Age-Related Differences in Shallow Semantic Processing of Text? Evidence From Eye Movements Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 177–203, 2006. @article{Daneman2006,After reading text such as Amanda was bouncing all over because she had taken too many tranquilizing sedatives in one day, young adult readers frequently fail to report that they noticed the anomalous noun phrase (NP). Although young readers of all skill levels are susceptible to this kind of shallow semantic processing, less-skilled readers are more susceptible and have particular difficulty detecting locally anomalous NPs such as tranquilizing stimulants. This article explores whether aging has a similar impact on a reader's propensity toward shallow semantic processing. Postreading responses showed that older readers frequently failed to report the anomalous NPs, but no more frequently than did younger readers. The eye-fixation behavior revealed that older readers actually detected the locally coherent anomalous NPs (e.g., tranquilizing sedatives) sooner than did younger readers, but had to allocate disproportionately more processing resources looking back to the locally incoherent anomalous NPs (tranquilizing stimulants) to achieve comparable levels of detection success as their younger counterparts. |
C. Hanisch; Ralph Radach; K. Holtkamp; B. Herpertz-Dahlmann; Kerstin Konrad Oculomotor inhibition in children with and without attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) Journal Article In: Journal of Neural Transmission, vol. 113, no. 5, pp. 671–684, 2006. @article{Hanisch2006,The aim of the present study was to distinguish between a general deficit in oculomotor control and a deficit restricted to inhibitory functions in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In addition, we were interested in differentiating between a general inhibition deficit and deficient subfunctions of inhibition. We used a prosaccade task to measure general oculomotor abilities in 22 children with ADHD and in age- and gender-matched healthy controls. A fixation, an antisaccade and a countermanding saccade task were used to measure specific aspects of oculomotor inhibition. Two major results were obtained: First, our prosaccade task suggests similar saccadic response preparation and saccadic accuracy in the ADHD compared to the control children. Secondly, the fixation and the countermanding saccade task indicate deficits on measures of oculomotor inhibition in the ADHD group. While patients were specifically impaired in stopping an already initiated response or in suppressing exploratory saccades in a novel situation, inhibition of a prepotent response was not deficient. Our data thus indicate an underlying impairment in cognitive inhibition in ADHD that has been associated with prefrontal lobe functions. More specifically, as the anterior cingulate gyrus has been associated with the countermanding saccade task and group differences were most pronounced in this paradigm our data are in line with imaging data stressing the importance of this cortical structure in the pathophysiology of ADHD. |
Trevor J. Hine; Guy Wallis; Joanne M. Wood; Efty P. Stavrou Reflexive optokinetic nystagmus in younger and older observers under photopic and mesopic viewing conditions Journal Article In: Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, vol. 47, no. 12, pp. 5288–5294, 2006. @article{Hine2006,PURPOSE: To investigate the effect of age on optokinetic nystagmus (OKN) in response to stimuli designed to preferentially stimulate the M-pathway. METHOD: OKN was recorded in 10 younger (32.3 +/- 5.98 years) and 10 older (65.6 +/- 6.53) subjects with normal vision. Vertical gratings of 0.43 or 1.08 cpd drifting at 5 degrees /s or 20 degrees /s and presented at either 8% or 80% contrast were displayed on a large screen as full-field stimulation, central stimulation within a central Gaussian-blurred window of 15 degrees diameter, or peripheral stimulation outside this window. All conditions apart from the high-contrast condition were presented in a random order at two light levels, mesopic (1.8 cdm(-2)) and photopic (71.5 cdm(-2)). RESULTS: Partial-field data indicated that central stimulation, mesopic light levels, and lower temporal frequency each significantly increased slow-phase velocity (SPV). Although there was no overall difference between groups for partial-field stimulation, full-field stimulation, or low-contrast stimulation, a change in illumination revealed a significant interaction with age: there was a larger decrease in SPV going from photopic to mesopic conditions for the older group than the younger group, especially for higher temporal frequency stimulation. CONCLUSIONS: OKN becomes reflexive in conditions conducive to M-pathway stimulation, and this rOKN response is significantly diminished in older healthy adults than in younger healthy adults, indicative of decreased M-pathway sensitivity. |
Florian Hutzler; Martin Kronbichler; Arthur M. Jacobs; Heinz Wimmer Perhaps correlational but not causal: No effect of dyslexic readers' magnocellular system on their eye movements during reading Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 44, no. 4, pp. 637–648, 2006. @article{Hutzler2006,During reading, dyslexic readers exhibit more and longer fixations and a higher percentage of regressions than normal readers. It is still a matter of debate, whether these divergent eye movement patterns of dyslexic readers reflect an underlying problem in word processing or whether they are - as the proponents of the magnocellular deficit hypothesis claim - associated with deficient visual perception that is causal for dyslexia. To overcome problems in the empirical linkage of the magnocellular theory with reading, a string processing task is presented that poses similar demands on visual perception (in terms of letter identification) and oculomotor control as reading does. Two experiments revealed no differences in the eye movement patterns of dyslexic and control readers performing this task. Furthermore, no relationship between the functionality of the participants' magnocellular system assessed by the coherent motion task and string processing were found. The perceptual and oculomotor demands required during string processing were functionally equivalent to those during reading and the presented consonant strings had similar visual characteristics as reading material. Thus, a strong inference can be drawn: Dyslexic readers do not seem to have difficulties with the accurate perception of letters and the control of their eye movements during reading - their reading difficulties therefore cannot be explained in terms of oculomotor and visuo-perceptual problems. |
Arthur F. Kramer; Walter R. Boot; Jason S. McCarley; Matthew S. Peterson; Angela M. Colcombe; Charles T. Scialfa Aging, memory and visual search Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 122, no. 3, pp. 288–304, 2006. @article{Kramer2006,Potential age-related differences in the memory processes that underlie visual search are examined in the present study. Using a dynamic, gaze-contingent search paradigm developed to assess memory for previously examined distractors, older adults demonstrated no memory deficit. Surprisingly, older adults made fewer refixations compared to their younger counterparts, indicating better memory for previously inspected objects. This improved memory was not the result of a speed-accuracy trade-off or larger Inhibition-of-Return effects for older than for younger adults. Additional analyses suggested that older adults may derive their benefit from finer spatial encoding of search items. These findings suggest that some of the memory processes that support visual search are relatively age invariant. |
Jay Pratt; Michael Dodd; Timothy N. Welsh Growing older does not always mean moving slower: Examining aging and the saccadic motor system Journal Article In: Journal of Motor Behavior, vol. 38, no. 5, pp. 373–382, 2006. @article{Pratt2006,Although humans typically move more slowly as they age, one exception may be the saccadic motor system. To fully determine whether the execution of saccades is affected by age, the authors examined detailed kinematics of vertical and horizontal saccades across a range of saccadic amplitudes (4 degrees, 8 degrees, and 12 degrees). Ten younger and 20 older adults participated in each experiment. Whereas in the 1st experiment, the authors assessed volitionally generated saccades, in the 2nd experiment, they evaluated reflexively generated saccades. The results of those experiments showed that the saccadic motor system is relatively impervious to the effects of aging; in fact, the differences between vertical and horizontal saccades were more evident than were differences between saccades produced by younger and older adults. The authors discuss possible reasons for that relative resistance to aging. |
Keith Rayner; Erik D. Reichle; Michael J. Stroud; Carrick C. Williams; Alexander Pollatsek The effect of word frequency, word predictability, and font difficulty on the eye movements of young and older readers Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 448–465, 2006. @article{rayner2006effect,Young adult and older readers' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing target words that varied in frequency or predictability. In addition, half of the sentences were printed in a font that was easy to read (Times New Roman) and the other half were printed in a font that was more difficult to read (Old English). Word frequency, word predictability, and font difficulty effects were apparent in the eye movement data of both groups of readers. In the fixation time data, the pattern of results was the same, but the older readers had larger frequency and predictability effects than the younger readers. The older readers skipped words more often than the younger readers (as indicated by their skipping rate on selected target words), but they made more regressions back to the target words and more regressions overall. The E-Z Reader model was used as a platform to evaluate the results, and simulations using the model suggest that lexical processing is slowed in older readers and that, possibly as a result of this, they adopt a more risky reading strategy. |
Jennifer D. Ryan; Jiye Shen; Eyal M. Reingold Modulation of distraction in ageing Journal Article In: British Journal of Psychology, vol. 97, no. 3, pp. 339–351, 2006. @article{ryan2006modulation,A cueing paradigm was employed to examine modulation of distraction due to a visual singleton. Subjects were required to make a saccade to a shape-singleton target. A predictive location cue indicated the hemifield where a target would appear. Older adults made more anticipatory saccades than younger adults, and were less accurate for making an eye movement in the vicinity of a target. However, younger and older adults likewise benefited from the cue; distraction was reduced when the distractor singleton appeared in an uncued hemisphere. The ability to compensate for problems with distraction in older and younger adults through use of the precue suggests that attention to a general region of space, rather than a specific location, may be enough to modulate distraction. |
2005 |
Lisa R. Betts; Christopher P. Taylor; Allison B. Sekuler; Patrick J. Bennett Aging reduces center-surround antagonism in visual motion processing Journal Article In: Neuron, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 361–366, 2005. @article{Betts2005,Discriminating the direction of motion of a low-contrast pattern becomes easier with increasing stimulus area. However, increasing the size of a high-contrast pattern makes it more difficult for observers to discriminate motion. This surprising result, termed spatial suppression, is thought to be mediated by a form of center-surround suppression found throughout the visual pathway. Here, we examine the counterintuitive hypothesis that aging alters such center-surround interactions in ways that improve performance in some tasks. We found that older observers required briefer stimulus durations than did younger observers to extract information about stimulus direction in conditions using large, high-contrast patterns. We suggest that this age-related improvement in motion discrimination may be linked to reduced GABAergic functioning in the senescent brain, which reduces center-surround suppression in motion-selective neurons. |
Mary Ann Evans; Jean Saint-Aubin What children are looking at during shared storybook reading Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 16, no. 11, pp. 913–920, 2005. @article{Evans2005,Two studies were conducted to determine the extent to which young children fixate on the print of storybooks during shared book reading. Children's books varying in the layout of the print and the richness of the illustrations were displayed on a computer monitor. Each child's mother or preschool teacher read the books while the child sat on the adult's lap wearing an EyeLink headband that recorded visual fixations. In both studies, children spent very little time examining the print regardless of the nature of the print and illustrations. Although fixations on the illustrations were highly correlated with the length of the accompanying text and could be altered by altering the content of the text, fixations to the text were uncorrelated with the length of the text. These results indicate that preschool children engage in minimal exploration of the print during shared book reading. |
Arthur F. Kramer; Jessica C. M. Gonzalez de Sather; Nicholas D. Cassavaugh Development of attentional and oculomotor control Journal Article In: Developmental Psychology, vol. 41, no. 5, pp. 760–772, 2005. @article{Kramer2005,The present study was conducted to examine the development of attentional and oculomotor control. More specifically, the authors were interested in the development of the ability to inhibit an incorrect but prepotent response to a salient distractor. Participants, who ranged in age from 8 to 25 years, performed 3 different eye movement tasks: a prosaccade, an antisaccade, and an oculomotor capture task. The time required to initiate a saccade decreased with age across all 3 tasks. Consistent with previous reports, accuracy was relatively age invariant in the prosaccade task. Performance improved with age, asymptoting at 16 years in the antisaccade task. It is interesting to note that despite the superficial similarity of the antisaccade and oculomotor capture tasks, performance was relatively age invariant in the latter. These results are discussed in terms of developmental differences in the interaction of goal-directed and stimulus-driven processes in the control of attention and action. |
Taina M. Lehtimäki; Ronan G. Reilly Improving eye movement control in young readers Journal Article In: Artificial Intelligence Review, vol. 24, no. 3-4, pp. 477–488, 2005. @article{Lehtimaeki2005,The objective of our study is to design and evaluate an oculomotor reading aid for beginning readers. The aid consists of an eye-tracking device and a computer program that gives real-time feedback in the form of a game to the subject about their fixation position on words. An experimental study was conducted with 8-year-old children. We evaluated the effectiveness of the aid for each child by comparing the landing site distributions before and after playing the game. We found that the peak of the landing site distribution moved towards the optimal viewing position (OVP) for word identification after playing the game. We also determined that training had a positive effect on gaze duration, on the mean and distribution of number of fixations per word, and on the percentage of words with refixations in the majority of subjects. |
Geoffrey Underwood; Nicola Phelps; Chloe Wright; Editha M. Loon; Adam J. Galpin Eye fixation scanpaths of younger and older drivers in a hazard perception task Journal Article In: Ophthalmic and Physiological Optics, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 346–356, 2005. @article{Underwood2005a,Our previous research has shown that observing patterns of eye fixations is a successful method of establishing differences in underlying cognitive processes between groups of drivers. Eye movements recorded from drivers in a laboratory while they watch film clips recorded from a driver's perspective can be used to identify scanpaths and search patterns that reveal ability differences. In the present study 12 older subjects (60-75 years) and 12 younger subjects (30-45 years) watched clips for potential hazards such as other road users appearing on an intersecting trajectory. Acuity and visual field differences between the two groups were eliminated through screening, so that only age-related differences would emerge. Eye fixations were analysed on a frame-by-frame basis to generate sequences of codes representing the location and object of the viewer's interest, before and during the appearance of a hazard. These codes were analysed for the existence of two fixation scanpaths using Markov Matrices. Unique scanpaths were identified for each group of drivers before and during the hazard. Evidence from the inspection of different objects and from the spread of the search indicated that both groups of driver were sensitive to attentional capture by the appearance of the hazard. Detection of the hazards - both speed and accuracy - was similar for older and younger drivers, although the older drivers perceived the films as being more hazardous in general. There is little evidence in this study of an age-related decline in the search of the scene when detecting hazards. |
2004 |
Agnieszka Bojko; Arthur F. Kramer; Matthew S. Peterson Age equivalence in switch costs for prosaccade and antisaccade tasks Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 226–234, 2004. @article{Bojko2004,This study examined age differences in task switching using prosaccade and antisaccade tasks. Significant specific and general switch costs were found for both young and old adults, suggesting the existence of 2 types of processes: those responsible for activation of the currently relevant task set and deactivation of the previously relevant task set and those responsible for maintaining more than 1 task active in working memory. Contrary to the findings of previous research, which used manual response tasks with arbitrary stimulus-response mappings to study task-switching performance, no age-related deficits in either type of switch costs were found. These data suggest age-related sparing of task-switching processes in situations in which memory load is low and stimulus-response mappings are well learned. |
Nicholas Cassavaugh; Arthur F. Kramer; Matthew S. Peterson Aging and the strategic control of the fixation offset effect Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 357–361, 2004. @article{Cassavaugh2004,A study was conducted to examine potential age-related differences in the strategic control of exogenous and endogenous saccades within the context of the fixation offset effect (FOE; i.e., faster saccades when a fixation point is removed than when it is left on throughout a trial). Subjects were instructed to make rapid saccades either on the basis of a suddenly appearing peripheral visual stimulus (exogenous saccade) or in response to a tone (endogenous saccade). On half of the trials the fixation point was removed simultaneously with the occurrence of the cue stimulus. Subjects' preparatory set was varied by manipulating the proportion of saccades generated to a visual and auditory stimulus within a trial block. Young and old adults both produced FOEs, and the FOEs were strategically modulated by preparatory set. The data are discussed in terms of aging and oculomotor control. |
Frank A. Proudlock; Himanshu Shekhar; Irene Gottlob Age-related changes in head and eye coordination Journal Article In: Neurobiology of Aging, vol. 25, no. 10, pp. 1377–1385, 2004. @article{Proudlock2004,The effect of ageing upon head movements during gaze shifts is unknown. We have investigated age-related changes in head and eye coordination in a group of healthy volunteers. Horizontal head and eye movements were recorded in 53 subjects, aged between 20 and 83 years, during the performance of saccades, antisaccades, smooth pursuit and a reading task. The subjects were divided into three groups, young subjects (20-40 years), middle-aged subjects (41-60 years) and older subjects (over 60 years). Logarithmic transformations of the head gain were significantly greater in the older subjects compared to the young subjects during the saccadic task (P=0.001), antisaccadic task (P=0.0004), smooth pursuit at 20°/s (P=0.001) and 40°/s (P=0.005), but not reading. For saccadic and antisaccadic tasks, the increase in transformed head gain was non-linear with significant differences between older and middle-aged subjects but not middle-aged and young subjects. Head movement tendencies were highly consistent for related tasks. Head movement gain during gaze shifts significantly increases with age, which may contribute to dizziness and balance problems experienced by the elderly. |
2003 |
Nicholas D. Cassavaugh; Arthur F. Kramer; David E. Irwin Influence of task-irrelevant onset distractors on the visual search performance of young and old adults Journal Article In: Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 44–60, 2003. @article{Cassavaugh2003,We examined potential age-related differences in attentional and oculomotor capture by single and multiple abrupt onsets in a singleton search paradigm. 24 participants were instructed to move their eyes as quickly as possible to a color singleton target and to identify a small letter located inside it. Either single or dual onset task-irrelevant distractors were presented simultaneously with the color change that defined the target, or one onset distractor was presented prior to and another onset distractor was presented during the participant's initial eye movement away from fixation. Young and old adults misdirected their eyes to the single and dual onset task-irrelevant distractors, on an equivalent proportion of trials, relative to control trials. However, older adults' saccade latencies and RTs were influenced to a greater extent by onsets compared to younger adults'. These data are discussed in terms of age-related differences in attentional control and oculomotor capture. |
Angela M. Colcombe; Arthur F. Kramer; David E. Irwin; Matthew S. Peterson; Stanley Colcombe; Sowon Hahn Age-related effects of attentional and oculomotor capture by onsets and color singletons as a function of experience Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 113, no. 2, pp. 205–225, 2003. @article{Colcombe2003,The present experiment examined the degree to which experience with different stimulus characteristics affects attentional capture, particularly as related to aging. Participants were presented with onset target/color singleton distractor or color singleton target/onset distractor pairs across three experimental sessions. The target/distractor pairs were reversed in the second session such that the target in the first session became the distractor in the second and third sessions. For both young and old adults previous experience with color as a target defining feature influenced oculomotor capture with task-irrelevant color distractors. Experience with sudden onsets had the same effect for younger and older adults, although capture effects were substantially larger for onset than for color distractors. Experience-based capture effects diminished relatively rapidly after target and distractor-defining properties were reversed. The results are discussed in terms of top-down and stimulus-driven effects on age-related differences in attentional control. ©2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. |
Willem P. A. Kelders; Gert Jan Kleinrensink; Josef N. Geest; Louw Feenstra; Chris I. De Zeeuw; Maarten A. Frens Compensatory increase of the cervico-ocular reflex with age in healthy humans Journal Article In: Journal of Physiology, vol. 553, no. 1, pp. 311–317, 2003. @article{Kelders2003,The cervico-ocular reflex (COR) is an ocular stabilization reflex that is elicited by rotation of the neck. It works in conjunction with the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) and the optokinetic reflex (OKR) in order to prevent visual slip over the retina due to self-motion. The gains of the VOR and OKR are known to decrease with age. We have investigated whether the COR, a reflexive eye movement elicited by rotation of the neck, shows a compensatory increase and whether a synergy exists between the COR and the other ocular stabilization reflexes. In the present study 35 healthy subjects of varying age (20-86 years) were rotated in the dark in a trunk-to-head manner (the head fixed in spaced with the body passively rotated under it) at peak velocities between 2.1 and 12.6 deg s-1 as a COR stimulus. Another 15 were subjected to COR, VOR and OKR stimuli at frequencies between 0.04 and 0.1 Hz. Three subjects participated in both tests. The position of the eyes was recorded with an infrared recording technique. We found that the COR-gain increases with increasing age and that there is a significant covariation between the gains of the VOR and COR, meaning that when VOR increases, COR decreases and vice versa. A nearly constant phase lag between the COR and the VOR of about 25 deg existed at all stimulus frequencies. |
Chiang-Shan Ray Li; Hsueh-Ling Chang; Shih Chieh Lin Inhibition of return in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder Journal Article In: Experimental Brain Research, vol. 149, no. 1, pp. 125–130, 2003. @article{Li2003,Earlier studies have suggested an impairment in the attention and eye movement control of children with ADHD. An important phenomenon in the control of attentional shifts and eye movements is the inhibition of return (IOR), which states that our brain works in a way that prevents our attention from returning to a spatial location that has been attended to, either overtly or covertly. This current study addresses whether the IOR in oculomotor planning is compromised in children with ADHD. Eleven ADHD and 12 age- and gender-matched control subjects participated in a behavioral task, in which they made saccades to a peripheral target after a valid, invalid or neutral cue. The latency difference between cued and uncued saccades over a range of cue-target onset asynchrony as well as the positive component of this latency profile (i.e., IOR) was compared between groups. The results show that ADHD children demonstrate a biphasic latency profile that is grossly similar to that observed in control subjects, although the magnitude of IOR appears to be slightly smaller in ADHD subjects. These preliminary results suggest that the inhibitory attention mechanism subserving IOR is at least not fully compromised in ADHD children. |
2000 |
Arthur F. Kramer; Sowon Hahn; David E. Irwin; Jan Theeuwes Age differences in the control of looking behavior: Do you know where your eyes have been? Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 210–217, 2000. @article{Kramer2000,Previous research has shown that during visual search young and old adults' eye movements are equivalently influenced by the appearance of task-irrelevant abrupt onsets. The finding of age-equivalent oculomotor capture is quite surprising in light of the abundant research suggesting that older adults exhibit poorer inhibitory control than young adults on a variety of different tasks. In the present study, we examined the hypothesis that oculomotor capture is age invariant when subjects' awareness of the appearance of task-irrelevant onsets is low, but that older adults will have more difficulty than young adults in inhibiting reflexive eye movements to task-irrelevant onsets when awareness of these objects is high. Our results were consistent with the level-of-awareness hypothesis. Young and old adults showed equivalent patterns of oculomotor capture with equiluminant onsets, but older adults misdirected their eyes to bright onsets more often than young adults did. |