Microsaccadic behavior when developing a complex dynamical activity

Abstract

Microsaccade are sensitive to changes of perceptual inputs as well as modulations of cognitive states. There are just a few works analyzing microsaccade while subjects are processing complex information and fewer when doing predictions about upcoming events. To evaluate whether contextual predictability would change microsaccadic behavior, we evaluated microsaccade of twenty one persons when reading 40 regular sentences and 40 proverbs. Analysis of microsaccade during reading proverbs and regular sentences revealed that microsaccade rate on words before maxjump, during maxjump and words after maxjump varied depending on the kind of sentence and on the word predictability. Maxjump was defined as the word with the largest difference between the cloze predictability of two consecutive words. Low and high predictable words demanded less or more microsaccade on words previous, during and on maxjump depending of the semantic context and of the readers' predictions of upcoming words. In summary, the present study shows that microsaccade' rate evidenced significant differences when reading proverbs and regular sentences. Hence, evaluation of microsaccade during reading sentences with different contextual predictability might provide information about specific effect of cue attention on complex task.