READING, EYE MOVEMENT, AND THE BRAIN

This post and the accompanying mini-lectures examine and describe how your eyes function while creating meaning with print.

Your Dancing Eyeballs

Right now as you are reading the sentences on this page your eyeballs are not moving from left to right, letter-to-letter, word-to-word in a straight, steady line. If you were able to attach little lasers to your eyeballs you would see that your eyes move unevenly, go back occasionally, skip some words, and fixate on others (Paulson & Goodman, 2008). These small, rapid, jerky movements that your eyes make are called saccades.  It only appears that you are moving them from left to right in a straight line because your brain is doing what human brains naturally do: they create order out of chaos.                                       

Your brain tricks you into thinking that you process every word when in fact you do not. Instead your eyeballs fixate on only about 60% of the words you read (Paulson & Goodman, 2008). With unfamiliar material you fixate on more words; with familiar material you fixate on fewer words. This means your eyes dance right over 40% of the words without stopping. You are doing it right now. It only appears as if you are reading every word because your brain is filling in the blanks.                                                  

Perception

Your eye has three visual regions available during reading: foveal, parafoveal, and periphera. The foveal takes up only 1% to 2% of your total vision. This is the point of fixation where you are able to see clearly and process details. You can take in only about three to six letters here. The parafoveal is the region directly surrounding the foveal region. Here you are able to take in about 24 to 30 letters, however, not very clearly. In this region you can identify gross shapes but without some sort of context, the strings of letters are indistinguishable. The peripheral region is everything else. Here you are able to perceive only gross shapes.                   

So with this very small in-focus viewing area how is anybody able to read more than 10 words per minute?  Efficient readers are able to read quickly because of the top-down flow of information moving from the cortex to the thalamus. When we read, we use the information in our head along with the context of what we are reading (semantics) and the syntax of the sentences to make predictions about the upcoming text. These predictions enable us to make sense of the semi-blurred letters found in the parafoveal regions and to identify words. Efficient readers do not process every letter in a word or every word in a sentence; rather, they recognize words using semantics and syntax and minimal letter clues. Because we are creating meaning with print, our brain only tricks us into thinking we have looked at every letter in every word.

MINI-LECTURES RELATED TO READING, EYE MOVEMENT, AND THE BRAIN

Reading, Eye Movement, and the Brain

Reading: Saccades and Fixations.1 

Reading: Saccades and Fixations.2

Reading: Saccades and Fixations.3

Reading: Saccades and Fixations.4

Reading: Saccades and Fixations.5

Psycholinguistic Approach to Reading and Remediation

This is an excerpt from my book:  10 Essential Instructional Elements For Students With Reading Difficulties: A Brain-Friendly Approach  (2016), published by Corwin Publishers

Online Professional Development: Reading Instruction for Struggling Readers.