A model of saccadic landing positions in reading under the influence of sensory noise

Abstract

During reading, saccadic eye movements are produced to move the high acuity foveal region of the eye to words of interest for efficient word processing. Distributions of saccadic landing positions peak close to a word's centre but are relatively broad compared to simple oculomotor tasks. Moreover, landing-position distributions are modulated both by distance of the launch site and by saccade type (e.g., one-step saccade, word skipping, refixation). Here we present a mathematical model for the computation of a saccade intended for a given target word. Two fundamental assumptions are related to (1) the sensory computation of the word centre from inter-word spaces and (2) the integration of sensory information and a priori knowledge using Bayesian estimation. Our model was developed for data from a large corpus of eye movements from normal reading. We demonstrate that the model is able simultaneously to account for a systematic shift of saccadic mean landing position with increasing launch-site distance and for qualitative differences between one-step saccades (i.e., from a given word to the next word) and word-skipping saccades.