Using MEG and Eye-Tracking to Examine the Eye-Mind Link During Reading

A core assumption of serial-attention models of eye-movement control during reading is that the completion of some stage of the lexical processing of word N is what initiates the programming of a saccade to move the eyes to word N+1 (Reichle, 2021).  To test this assumption, an MEG experiment was conducted in which participants made lexical decisions about pairs of simultaneously displayed letter strings, with one being displayed in central vision and the other being randomly displayed in left or right peripheral vision, and with the letter strings being high-frequency words, low-frequency words, or non-words.  Participants’ eye movements were recorded to identify saccade onsets from the central to peripheral letter strings, allowing for the interpretation of the MEG-measured cortical activity associated with processing the centrally displayed words (as indexed by differences related to processing the high- vs. low-frequency words) over an interval spanning their display onset to saccade onset.  The results provide physiological evidence for a strong eye-mind link, consistent with the assumption of serial-attention models that lexical processing is the “engine” driving eye movements during reading.