Oculomotor Reactions in Students During Text Perception

Abstract

The study of oculomotor reactions in the process of performing cognitive tasks is becoming increasingly popular among psychophysiologists. The use of eye tracking techniques extended our knowledge about eye movements when perceiving visual information. Modern research using eye tracking focuses on oculomotor reactions while perceiving images and texts, performing logical visual tasks, etc. It should be noted that eye tracking parameters in visual cognitive activity not only reflect the peculiarities of eye movements, but also serve as markers of brain activity in terms of perception and processing of information. Of particular interest are eye tracking studies involving reading texts of varying complexity and emotional content with normal and inverted word order in sentences. This paper presents the results of an eyetracking research involving students during visual perception of texts. Two types of texts were used: text with correct order of letters and text with changed order of letters in words. We examined 40 students of Northern (Arctic) Federal University named after M.V. Lomonosov using the eye tracking system iView X ™ RED (SensoMotoric Instruments, Germany). It recorded a significantly higher number of fixations and saccades as well as longer duration of fixations while reading the text with changed order of letters in words. The subjects demonstrated a holistic perception of words when working with the text with changed order of letters, which led to shorter reading time. As a result, we identified two ways of visual information processing with high reproducibility, regardless of the text type: focused and superficial reading.
For citation: Zvyagina N.V., Taleeva A.I., Kuznetsova D.A. Oculomotor Reactions in Students During Text Perception. Journal of Medical and Biological Research, 2021, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 145–152. DOI: 10.37482/2687-1491-Z052