Swets Benjamin, Kurby Christopher A
Department of Psychology, Grand Valley State University.
Cogn Sci. 2016 Mar;40(2):466-80. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12240. Epub 2015 Apr 8.
When we read narrative texts such as novels and newspaper articles, we segment information presented in such texts into discrete events, with distinct boundaries between those events. But do our eyes reflect this event structure while reading? This study examines whether eye movements during the reading of discourse reveal how readers respond online to event structure. Participants read narrative passages as we monitored their eye movements. Several measures revealed that event structure predicted eye movements. In two experiments, we found that both early and overall reading times were longer for event boundaries. We also found that regressive saccades were more likely to land on event boundaries, but that readers were less likely to regress out of an event boundary. Experiment 2 also demonstrated that tracking event structure carries a working memory load. Eye movements provide a rich set of online data to test the cognitive reality of event segmentation during reading.
当我们阅读小说和报纸文章等叙事文本时，我们会将此类文本中呈现的信息分割成离散的事件，这些事件之间有明显的界限。但是我们的眼睛在阅读时会反映出这种事件结构吗？本研究考察了在阅读语篇过程中的眼动是否揭示了读者在在线阅读时对事件结构的反应。在监测参与者眼动的同时，让他们阅读叙事段落。几项测量结果表明，事件结构可预测眼动。在两项实验中，我们发现事件边界处的早期阅读时间和总体阅读时间都更长。我们还发现，回视扫视更有可能落在事件边界上，但读者从事件边界处回视出去的可能性较小。实验2还表明，追踪事件结构会带来工作记忆负担。眼动提供了丰富的在线数据，可用于测试阅读过程中事件分割的认知现实情况。
