3 ms·

Was it really just replacing each other letter with x? I can notice the string of x's with my peripheral vision. Also, the words must have been quite a bit fa

by shasta 11y ago

Was it really just replacing each other letter with x? I can notice the string of x's with my peripheral vision. Also, the words must have been quite a bit farther apart than they are on my screen.

nkrisc 11y ago
Yes but you're also able to focus on the words made up entirely of 'x'. I don't think you can really judge the effect because 1) it's not the same effect here and 2) you already know about it now.
Phemist 11y ago
I was paraphrasing this from memory. The dependency is quite complex, it depends on the amount of degrees the text occupies in your field of vision, but also on the mode of reading you're in (very focused reading seems to narrow the fixation span). Also, please note that your eye makes constant micro-saccades (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsaccade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsaccade), and that the authors of the paper were probably compensating for these saccades as well, more or less. Quote from the actual paper This experiment has provided data which begin to answer the question about the size of the perceptual span during a fixation in reading. Although it may be possible in tasks other than reading for subjects to identify letters. word shapes, and word-length patterns some distance into the peripheral areas, in fluent reading this information appears to be obtained and used from a relatively narrow region. Thus. a theory of fluent reading need not suppose that word-shape and specific letter information is obtained from a region occupied by more than about three or four words during a fixation. and perhaps not that large if the span is not symmetrical around the point of central vision, a question not tested in the present study. Thus. it does not appear to be true that entire sentences are seen during a fixation; in fact. for most fixations. not even a complete phrase will lie within this area. So the "window" or "span" that needed to be un-masked was about 3-4 words wide (interestingly, this did not necessarily depend fully on the length of the words)

by shasta 11y ago

Was it really just replacing each other letter with x? I can notice the string of x's with my peripheral vision. Also, the words must have been quite a bit farther apart than they are on my screen.

nkrisc 11y ago

Yes but you're also able to focus on the words made up entirely of 'x'. I don't think you can really judge the effect because 1) it's not the same effect here and 2) you already know about it now.

Phemist 11y ago

I was paraphrasing this from memory. The dependency is quite complex, it depends on the amount of degrees the text occupies in your field of vision, but also on the mode of reading you're in (very focused reading seems to narrow the fixation span). Also, please note that your eye makes constant micro-saccades (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsaccade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsaccade), and that the authors of the paper were probably compensating for these saccades as well, more or less. Quote from the actual paper This experiment has provided data which begin to answer the question about the size of the perceptual span during a fixation in reading. Although it may be possible in tasks other than reading for subjects to identify letters. word shapes, and word-length patterns some distance into the peripheral areas, in fluent reading this information appears to be obtained and used from a relatively narrow region. Thus. a theory of fluent reading need not suppose that word-shape and specific letter information is obtained from a region occupied by more than about three or four words during a fixation. and perhaps not that large if the span is not symmetrical around the point of central vision, a question not tested in the present study. Thus. it does not appear to be true that entire sentences are seen during a fixation; in fact. for most fixations. not even a complete phrase will lie within this area. So the "window" or "span" that needed to be un-masked was about 3-4 words wide (interestingly, this did not necessarily depend fully on the length of the words)