Co-registration of eye movements and fixation-related potentials in natural reading: Practical issues of experimental design and data analysis

A growing number of studies are using co-registration of eye movement (EM) and fixation-related potential (FRP) measures to investigate reading. However, the number of co-registration experiments remains small when compared to the number of studies in the literature conducted with EMs and event-related potentials (ERPs) alone. One reason for this is the complexity of the experimental design and data analyses. The present paper is designed to support researchers who might have expertise in conducting reading experiments with EM or ERP techniques and are wishing to take their first steps towards co-registration research. The objective of this paper is threefold. First, to provide an overview of the issues that such researchers would face. Second, to provide a critical overview of the methodological approaches available to date to deal with these issues. Third, to offer an example pipeline and a full set of scripts for data preprocessing that may be adopted and adapted for one's own needs. The data preprocessing steps are based on EM data parsing via Data Viewer (SR Research), and the provided scripts are written in Matlab and R. Ultimately, with this paper we hope to encourage other researchers to run co-registration experiments to study reading and human cognition more generally

A co-registration investigation of inter-word spacing and parafoveal preview: Eye movements and fixation-related potentials

Participants’ eye movements (EMs) and EEG signal were simultaneously recorded to examine foveal and parafoveal processing during sentence reading. All the words in the sentence were manipulated for inter-word spacing (intact spaces vs. spaces replaced by a random letter) and parafoveal preview (identical preview vs. random letter string preview). We observed disruption for unspaced text and invalid preview conditions in both EMs and fixation-related potentials (FRPs). Unspaced and invalid preview conditions received longer reading times than spaced and valid preview conditions. In addition, the FRP data showed that unspaced previews disrupted reading in earlier time windows of analysis, compared to string preview conditions. Moreover, the effect of parafoveal preview was greater for spaced relative to unspaced conditions, in both EMs and FRPs. These findings replicate well-established preview effects, provide novel insight into the neural correlates of reading with and without inter-word spacing and suggest that spatial selection precedes lexical processing

Warning – Taboo Words Ahead! Avoiding Attentional Capture by Spoken Taboo Distractors

Task-irrelevant sound disrupts serial short-term memory (STM). On the interference-by-process account, order cues arising from the automatic pre-categorical processing of changes in the sound conflicts with serial–order processing used for the memory task. It has been argued that post-categorical auditory distraction effects in serial STM—such as from spoken taboo words—are therefore problematic for this account. However, we test the view that the taboo-distractor effect, like other post-categorical distraction effects, is due to a distinct, attentional diversion, mechanism: We examine whether it is, unlike effects attributable to interference-by-process, amenable to top-down control. In Experiment 1, disruption of serial recall by taboo words was greater than that by neutral words as well as by words independently rated as more valent (but less taboo), suggesting that the taboo-word effect is not simply a valence effect. Neither the effect of taboo nor valence, however, was attenuated under high focal-task encoding load, which is thought to promote top-down control. However, in Experiment 2, foreknowledge of the distractors did eliminate the taboo-distractor effect while having no effect on disruption by neutral words. In conclusion, the taboo-distractor effect results from a controllable attentional-diversion mechanism distinct from that underpinning the effect of any acoustically-changing sound