Eye movements during silent and oral reading with stabilized versus free head movement and different eye-trackers

Abstract

Eye movement research of reading has been done on a battery of eye-tracking setups during last decades. We compared reading data of the same group of six students, their eyes were tracked by a video-based helmet-mounted system with the data sampling frequency of 50 Hz and a setup with a chin-rest at 240 Hz. We found that not only the number of fixations may decrease after reading practice, but so does also the mean duration of fixations. In spite of the short duration of saccades, their distributions and changes in them are similarly reported in the two experimental conditions. Lack of significant correlation in the HED data testifies to the result variability due to measurement technique. We conclude that the head-free setup is applicable in reading research but has insufficient precision to track changes in reading patterns.