title: Eye movements in a simple spatial reasoning task.
abstract: We report two experiments in which participants read a question about the spatial relationship between two letters, then viewed a visual display containing the letters and were required to respond to the question. The format of the question influenced the nature of the eye movements generated to the visual display. Participants also had a tendency to make additional eye movements in order to generate a fixation sequence that corresponded to the order of the letters in the question. This demonstrates an influence of stored information on eye movement generation, and suggests that the scanpath plays a role in structuring the visual information to facilitate reasoning.
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol, 8 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TN, UK. christof.koerner@uni-graz.at
authors.forename: Christof
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Körner
authors.forename: Iain D
authors.initials: ID
authors.lastname: Gilchrist
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011340:Problem Solving / Q000502:physiology*; D011601:Psychophysics; D011932:Reading; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*