UDC

612.846.1+159.93

Authors

Sokolova Lyudmila Vladimirovna, Institute of Natural Sciences and Technologies, Northern (Arctic) Federal University named after M.V. Lomonosov (Arkhangelsk, Russia) 

Abstract

The paper studied parameters of eye movements in Arkhangelsk university students aged 18 to 25 years (mean age 21.81±3.79 years) when processing text information. The experimental part of the research was based on binocular registration of oculomotor activity in the subjects performing cognitive tests. To record and analyse eye movements we used the high-frequency system of eye tracking iView X ™ RED by the German company SMI (HSSMI). Stimulus material was demonstrated by the special software: SMI Experiment Center and SMI BeGaze 3.0. We assessed the static and dynamic characteristics of eye movements in subjects performing certain cognitive tasks: reading an excerpt from a literary text and searching for a particular letter in a text stimulus. The analysis of oculomotor activity during cognitive task performance using stimuli with different syntactic, semantic and lexical components showed that these characteristics of text stimuli had no effect on the strategy of letter searching, which indicates that motivation and target setting play an important role in task performance. We found that the number of fixations per second is decreasing when semantic and syntactic links in a text stimulus are broken, while saccadic eye movements show high values. The most pronounced changes in the parameters of oculomotor activity were found at letter searching in a text stimulus consisting of a series of unrelated vowels and consonants, thus, it can be considered to be the hardest task, causing strain in the visual sensory system.

Keywords

oculomotor activity, saccade, fixation, text stimuli, morphological and linguistic characteristics.

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