Parafoveal = dependent on parts of the retina external to the fovea. The fovea is a small rodless area of the retina that affords acute vision.

SACCADE  = that small rapid jerky movement of the eye  as it jumps from fixation on one point to another (as in reading) Merriam-Webster

What follows is about the use of word-accurate eye-tracking technology to help understand how we read – I find it most revealing in relation to Dyslexia.

During reading of English, information is effectively used from three to four letters to the left and up to 14–15 letters to the right of fixation (McConkie & Rayner, 1975, 1976).

If you’ve got an eBook if you don’t already, go for this kind of seting:

Reducing the window to thirteen characters increases the fixation duration by 30 percent, decreases the saccade length for forward saccades by 26 percent, and increases reading time by 60 percent, as compared to a window size of 100 character spaces. (McConkie & Rayner, 1975)

Parafoveal preview starts the identification process of a word before fixation.

If I understand what follows correctly it means that it is easy to read phrases and sentences as part of a body of text, than it is to read one word at a time in isolation.

We get a perspective of what has been and what is coming up.

Our results suggest that previewing word n2 can result in delayed parafoveal-on-foveal effects, which are lagging behind or spilling over into postboundary fixations on word n1. The present findings do not disconfirm the general hypothesis of serial word-processing during reading, but they strongly suggest that mislocated fixations are not sufficient to account for the complex dynamics of processing in the perceptual span during reading. (McConkie & Rayner, 1975)

In this article, research on the following topics are reviewed with respect to reading:

• (a) the perceptual span (or span of effective vision),
• (b) preview benefit,
• (c) eye movement control, and
• (d) models of eye movements. (Rayner, 2009 p. 1456).

This makes sense if you watch very closely as someone reads. I’ve not done this since I was a child, watching a parent or grandparent read. Children struggle when they plod as if from one stepping stone to another. I wonder if it would be better for the child to skim read and get a sense of the story rather than reading it word for word?

It is my contention that most of the time in such tasks, either (a) eye location (overt attention) and covert attention are overlapping and at the same location or (b) attention disengagement is a product of a saccade programme (wherein attention precedes the eyes to the next saccade target). (Rayner, 2009 p. 1458).

In reading, for example, the line of text that the reader is looking at can be divided into three regions: the foveal region (2 degrees in the centre of vision), the parafoveal region (extending from the foveal region to about 5 degrees on either side of fixation), and the peripheral region (everything beyond the parafoveal region). (Rayner, 2009 p. 1459).

Saccade duration, the amount of time that is takes to actually move the eyes, is a function of the distance moved. (Rayner, 2009 p. 1459).

NB. Saccade size in visual search can be highly variable depending on the complexity of the array; when the array is complex and crowded, saccades are shorter (the same would hold for a highly complex scene). (Rayner, 2009 p. 1460).

Regressions (saccades that move backwards in the text) are the third important component of eye movements in reading and occur about 10–15% of the time in skilled readers. The long saccades just mentioned tend to follow a regression since readers typically move forward in the text past the point from which they originally launched the regression.Most regressions are to the immediately preceding word, though when comprehension is not going well or the text is particularly difficult, more long-range regressions occur to earlier words in the text. (Rayner, 2009 p. 1460).

Variables include (Rayner, 2009 p. 1460) :

• text difficulty
• reading skill
• characteristics of the writing system
• typographical variation (font)

- as text gets more difficult, fixations get longer, saccades get shorter, and more regressions are made (Rayner, 1998).

Dyslexics suffer from – longer fixations, shorter saccades, and more regressions – with normal text.

i.e. Bugger around with fonts, choice of words and other typographical variations and you start to replicate what it is like to be dyslexic.

Beginning and dyslexic readers have longer fixations, shorter saccades, and more regressions than skilled readers (Rayner, 1998), as do less skilled readers (Ashby, Rayner, & Clifton, 2005).

• Function words are skipped
• Fix is greater on longer words – 8 letter words are almost always fixated, 2 letter words are fixated 25% of the time.

How does this inform us of best practice for reading academic texts?

Read through with equal care more than once?

Skim read, the read with focus … or these three then stop and take notes. Or take notes from the start?

It is also clear that the spaces between words (which demarcate how long words are) are used in targeting where the next saccade will land. When spaces are removed, reading slows down by as much as 30–50% (Morris, Rayner, & Pollatsek, 1990; Pollatsek & Rayner, 1982; Rayner et al., 1998a; Rayner & Pollatsek, 1996; Spragins, Lefton, & Fisher, 1976). (Rayner, 2009 p. 1469).

• How were manuscripts laid out?
• What do early print look like?
• When did the need for spaces, sentences, paragraphs and such like develop?

There’s a science to writing as well as an art.

Over the past few years, it has become very clear that the ease or difficulty associated with processing the fixated word strongly influences when the eyes move (Liversedge & Findlay, 2000; Rayner, 1998; Starr & Rayner, 2001). (Rayner, 2009 p. 1472).

Fixation time on a word is influenced by a host of lexical and linguistic variables (Rayner, 2009 p. 1472):

• word frequency
• word predictability
• number of meanings
• age of acquisition
• phonological properties
• semantic relations with the fixed word and previous words

This is consistent with the view that what influences when to move the eyes during reading is different from visual search. (Rayner, 2009 p. 1472)

To what degree is reading a visual process or a cognitive process?

This debunks Marshall McLuhan theorising about the shift from the meaning of words in an oral tradition compared to the written word.

When raeding wrods with jubmled lettres and found that while it was fairly easy to read such text, there was always a cost associated with transposing the letters. (Rayner, 2009 p. 1473)

It is thus quite clear that lexical variables have strong and immediate effects on how long readers look at a word. While other linguistic variables can have an influence on how soon readers move on in the text, it is generally the case that higher level linguistic variables have somewhat later effects, unless the variable more or less“smacks you in the eye”. So, for example, when readers fixate on the disambiguating word in asyntactic garden path sentence there is increased fixation time on the word (Frazier & Rayner,1982; Rayner, Carlson, & Frazier, 1983; Rayner & Frazier, 1987) and/or a regression from the disambiguating word back to earlier parts of the sentence (Frazier & Rayner, 1982; Meseguer, Carreiras, & Clifton, 2002; Mitchell et al., 2008). (Rayner, 2009 p. 1473)

On the other hand, it is certainly the case that more and more researchers are turning to eye movement recording and data as a means to examine important issues about how the brain/mind handles information in various tasks. Many brain imaging techniques now enable researchers to also record eye movements(though rather crudely), and attempts to simultaneously record eye movements and event related potentials in reading and other tasks look very promising (Baccino & Manunta, 2005;Dambacher & Kliegl, 2007; Sereno & Rayner,2003). Thus, the future looks very bright with respect to the possibility of learning more about cognitive processing and how information is processed in the tasks described above via the use of eye movements. (Rayner, 2009 p. 1487)

REFERENCES

McConkie, G. W., & Rayner, R. (1975). The span of the effective stimulus during a fixation in reading. Perception & Psychophysics, 17, 578–586. doi:10.3758/BF03203972

Rayner (1998)
(Ashby, Rayner & Clifton, 2005)

Rayner, K 2009, ‘Eye movements and attention in reading, scene perception, and visual search’, Quarterly Journal Of Experimental Psychology, 62, 8, pp. 1457-1506, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 11 February 2013.

Related articles

• I love words (mymindbursts.com)
• Saccadic Momentum and Facilitation of Return Saccades Contribute to an Optimal Foraging Strategy (ploscompbiol.org)
• Brain Processing of Visual Information during Fast Eye Movements Maintains Motor Performance (plosone.org)
• Eva – Eye Tracking – Stimulus Integrated Semi Automatic Case Base System (slideshare.net)
• Decision making and degree of confidence – How confident are you about your choices? (ucsdneuro.wordpress.com)
• 6 Content Marketing Strategies Learned from The Hobbit (contentmarketinginstitute.com)

“How do you prefer to read, with an eReader like a Kindle or Nook, or with an old school paperback in hand?”

This has been an oft-asked question in recent years. My answer is simple: paperback all the way. Like other bloggers, I find the eReading experience to be too artificial. eBook producers try so hard to replicate the reading experience of old, yet what book lovers love most – the feel, the smell, and the beauty of the book – cannot be replicated in digital form.

This, of course, hasn’t stopped eBooks from reaching an unbelievable popularity. Their ease of use – the ability to have hundreds or thousands of books in your back pocket – has helped sales soar. Last year, eBook sales were higher than those of hardcover books. These sales are typically copies of print books in .pdf or other formats. There will always be “old school” readers who hold out against them. What eBook producers need to do to secure this market is to offer a completely new digital product: something that doesn’t merely copy the beloved book and, more perhaps importantly, something that cannot be copied by booksellers in turn. eBooks should deliver, if you’ll pardon the pun, a novel reading experience. While digital texts seem very much to be “the future” of literature, there is still a place for the book. But eBooks can and should expand in ways that print texts cannot.

One way to approach this is to publish hypertext eBooks. While you might simply know hypertext as the language that lets you jump around from website to website through traditionally blue, underlined “links”, hypertext can be – and has been – used for fiction-writing purposes.

In the (highly recommended) class on Digital Literature I took last year, hypertext was the first digital medium we studied. We used Eastgate Systems’ Storyspace software to read Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson and Victory Garden by Stuart Malthroup. Both of these texts were written in the 1980s – early days, as far as dig-lit is concerned. However, despite the primitiveness of their technology, both Jackson and Malthroup ably and effectively used hypertext to create elaborate storyworlds in a way that writers of print texts cannot. The writers inserted hyperlinks which branched the story off in different directions, telling a different story – or a different side to the same story. They created “webs” of stories, as opposed to the traditional, sequential page-turner. Of course, these hypertexts were only available on computers. eBooks are perfect for telling portable hypertext stories and the technology is already out there.

From Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl

Some writers are already composing hypertext stories specifically for eReaders (see “Innovation and the Future of Books” by John W. Warren). eBooks can also incorporate multimedia in the tale. No print book can have additional audio, video, or animations. These enhanced books are perfect for demonstrating the capabilities of the technology and the benefits of using a digital reader. No longer should eBooks merely mimic the tried-and-tested method of storytelling; they need to include the medium in the story in order to win over an audience well-accustomed to the intricacies of digital technology. At this time, unfortunately, these kinds of eBooks are few and far between.

So to return to the original question, I still prefer the experience of reading a book in physical form. But the book, like the record did before it, will eventually fall to a newer technology. I hope that when this happens, eBooks will provide something more than just a book. They can and should expand in ways their print counterparts cannot. I look forward to a day when an eBook is not merely a .pdf reader, but a new reading experience that takes full advantage of their digital medium.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics plays with:

The types of traffic sources.

On the Internet there are only two real traffic sources, direct and reference, no longer exist.

Direct Traffic: Because, typing a URL in the address bar of your browser, you can directly access the desired web page, no more. It is the most recommended way to get traffic to any business, because the more we increase that half the percentage of the total, means that we reduce dependence on third-party references, such as advertising campaigns, search engines, blogs and newspaper articles, etc..

The only way to increase our direct trade is to increase our brand awareness and the user does not browse our web page in search engines, or expect to find that someone mentioned it in place, he shared in a social network or mailed to us. But on the other hand, remember our names, and even the domain extension, and enters typing and pressing enter. Brand awareness is achieved only with branding, positioning our product properly in the consumer’s mind.

Reference Traffic: Internet is based on hyper-textual language HTML, which essentially adds the link to the text element, making you jump from one page to another to surf the web. So if another page put a link to yours can cause end his visit on your site, that’s what we call referral traffic and do not care if the source comes from a blog, a newspaper, directory, social network shift or a search engine, or whatever.

Then .. Why have Google Analytics in addition to these two real categories, both in the menu and in the overall pie options Campaigns and <Searche engines? Are they two different sources and additional level with the above? Because for all what they seem.

The first source of traffic: Campaigns (most recent inclusion on the menu), being a sub category: referral traffic, is well placed to encourage, to any web site owner or business, look so outstanding, that to suggest that there is a way to get traffic, which is becoming even not get the traffic that should have.

The second source of traffic: searches (which I believe is included since birth Google Analytics) and is also a sub category: referral traffic, thereby highlighting it, is like saying that users will come by the form, not because the form is found in the Internet, but because Google brings you directly to the reference range. When actually only true for 50% of the equation, because Google does nothing more than a reference either to your website, if the user searches for your name, or any of the possible keywords (keywords) related to your business, or someone you have referred to you.

Play with ORGANIC traffic sources

Because as has been said several times by various experts to come to light this issue, if the user searches for something, then go alone to the web, Google Analytics is targeted on both himself, telling that comes with numbers Google’s search engine visits. Thus, get manipulate our perception of reality to the point that we depend on, and we have to rely even more on Google every day, because all our traffic, that is, views, and therefore purchases, and / or benefits depend Google, as it is not, at least not to the extent that we would want to believe, and least to the extent that “we have left” we tell him.

Play with us and our business

In this article I intend only to alert those being Google Analytics a free tool most used, think they do not pay a PRICE for it, and the price they pay is rather expensive, believe misrepresented data that result INFLUECE OUR DESICIONS and give more power to the monopoly that grows by the second, thanks to gullible as many of us.

And as a private company, they do what they want in their products, or misrepresents information in your analytics tool could be quite irrelevant, but when it is the most used, becomes a general problem and an abuse of power, one over many of the new Microsoft.

Bush then goes on to suggest tiny cameras with tiny film taking tiny pictures that could free up the arms of researchers. He also talks about the “arithmetic machines” of the future that will be electrical in nature. When Bush muses on the technological specifics of the future, his conclusions—in terms of the mechanics—seem ridiculous to the modern reader. This is because Bush was limited to thinking of analogue mediums of recording and processing; his ideas were ultimately limited by the knowledge of his time.

Eventually, Bush comes to his ultimate machine, “the memex,” and illuminates the ultimate problem: “Thus far we seem to be worse off than before—for we can enormously extend the record; yet even in its present bulk we can hardly consult it. This is a much larger matter than merely the extraction of data for the purposes of scientific research; it involves the entire process by which man profits by his inheritance of acquired knowledge” (Bush 8). Bush’s solution to the problem of information consultation is a device called the memex. The memex is essentially a desk with two screens on it, switches and leavers, and magnetic tape for recording and storing data. Technical specifics aside, the brilliance of the memex and how it tackles the problem of information access is by way of associative indexing “whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another” (Bush 11). Basically, Bush conceived of a machine that worked in much the same way the world wide web does by way of associations and hypertextuality. By creating “trails” of associated information, one could create and share collections of connected data which would not only be more intuitive, but would rapidly increase the speed and depth of research and information sharing.

Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic. July, 1945. Web. 3 Feb. 2013. (link to full text).