Eye movement in language reading

The study of eye movement in language reading stretches back almost a thousand years. Until the late 19th century, it was characterised by a reliance on naked-eye observation of eye movement, in the absence of technology. From the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries, investigators used early tracking technologies to assist their observation, in a research climate that emphasised the measurement of human behaviour and skill for educational ends. Much basic knowledge about eye movement was obtained during this period. Since the mid-20th century, there have been three major changes: the development of noninvasive eye-movement tracking equipment; the introduction of computer technology to enhance the power of this equipment to pick up, record and process the huge volume of data that eye movement generates; and the emergence of cognitive psychology as a theoretical and methodological framework within which reading processes are examined.

Unassisted observation and introspection
Until the second half of the 19th century, researchers had at their disposal two methods of investigating eye movement. The first, unaided observation, yielded only small amounts of data that would be considered unreliable by today's scientific standards. This lack of reliability arises from the fact that eye movement occurs frequently, rapidly, and over small angles, to the extent that it is impossible for an experimenter to perceive and record the data fully and accurately without technological assistance. The other method was self-observation, now considered to be of doubtful status in a scientific context. Despite this, some knowledge appears to have been produced from introspection and naked-eye observation. For example, Ibn al Haytham, a medical man in 11th-century Egypt, is reported to have written of reading in terms of a series of quick movements and to have realised that readers use peripheral as well as central vision.

For the next 800 years, there appear to be no records of eye movement research, and it was not until the early 19th century that written evidence of systematic investigation emerged. At first, the chief concern was to describe the eye as a physiological and mechanical moving object, the most serious attempt being Hermann von Helmholtz's major work Handbook of physiological optics (1866). The physiological approach was gradually superseded by interest in the psychological aspects of visual input, in eye movement as a functional component of visual tasks. As early as the 1840s, there was speculation on the relationship between central and peripheral vision. In 1879, the French ophthalmologist, Louis Émile Javal, used a mirror on one side of a page to observe eye movement in silent reading, and found that it involves a succession of discontinuous individual movements for which he coined the term saccades. In 1898, Erdmann & Dodge used a hand-mirror to estimate average fixation duration and saccade length with surprising accuracy.

Early tracking technology
The first devices for tracking eye movement took two main forms: those that relied on a mechanical connection between participant and recording instrument, and those in which light or some other form of electromagnetic energy was directed at the participant's eyes and its reflection measured and recorded. In 1983, Lamare was the first to use a mechanical connection, by placing a blunt needle on the participant's upper eyelid. The needle picked up the sound produced by each saccade and transmitted it as a faint clicking to the experimenter's ear through an amplifying membrane and a rubber tube. The rationale behind this device was that saccades are easier to perceive and register aurally than visually. In 1889, Edmund B. Delabarre invented a system of recording eye movement directly onto a rotating drum by means of a stylus with a direct mechanical connection to the cornea. Other devices involving physical contact with the surface of the eyes were developed and used from the end of the 19th century until the late 1920s; these included such items as rubber balloons and eye caps.

Mechanical systems suffered three serious disadvantages: questionable accuracy due to slippage of the physical connection, the considerable discomfort caused to participants by the direct mechanical connection (and consequently great difficulty in persuading people to participate), and issues of ocological validity, since participants' experience of reading in trials was significantly different from the normal reading experience. Despite these drawbacks, mechanical devices were used in eye movement research well into the 20th century.

Attempts were soon made to overcome these problems. One solution was to use electromagnetic energy rather than a mechanical connection. In the "Dodge technique", a beam of light was directed at the cornea, focused by a system of lenses and then recorded on a moveable photographic plate. Erdmann & Dodge used this technique to claim that there is little or no perception during saccades, a finding that was later confirmed by Utall & Smith using more sophisticated equipment. The photographic plate in the Dodge technique was soon replaced with a film camera, but was still plagued by problems of accuracy, due to the difficulty of keeping all parts of the equipment perfectly aligned throughout a trial and accurately compensating for the distortion caused by the diffractive qualities of photographic lenses. In addition, it was usually necessary to restrain a participant's head by using an uncomfortable bite-bar or head-clamp.

In 1922, Schott pioneered a further advance called electro-oculography (EOG), a method of recording the electrical potential between the cornea and the retina. Electrodes may be covered with special contact paste before been placed to the skin. So, it is unnecessary now to make an incisions in patient's skin. Common misconception about EOG is that measured potential is the electromyogram of extraocular muscles. In fact, it is only the projection of eye dipole to the skin, because higher frequencies, corresponding to EMG, are filtered out. EOG delivered considerable improvements in accuracy and reliability, which explain its continued use by experimentalists for many decades.

Cognitive psychology, infrared tracking and computer technology
Eye trackers bounce near infra-red light off the interior of the eyeball, and monitor the reflection on the eye to determine gaze location.

With this technique, the exact position of fixation on screen is determinable.

Top–down and bottom–up processing
Top down processing occurs when you attribute all your previously learned knowledge to a certain thing that you are perceiving in the environment. For example, when you see a dog running in a park, you can automatically say that it is a dog and what breed it is, because you will have already learned some information about dogs previously. Bottom up processing means working from the bottom up to the top in the sense that you work with the structural procedure, because you don't have any stored knowledge about the thing you are perceiving. for example, when perceiving an object in the environment, like a rock, you perceive its external shape first.