Reading is a highly complex learned skill in which humans move their eyes three to four times every second in response to visual and cognitive processing. The consensus view is that the details of these rapid eye-movement decisions—which part of a word to target with a saccade—are determined solely by low-level oculomotor heuristics. But maximally efficient saccade targeting would be sensitive to ongoing word identification, sending the eyes farther into a word the farther its identification has already progressed. Here, using a covert text-shifting paradigm, we showed just such a statistical relationship between saccade targeting in reading and trial-to-trial variability in cognitive processing. This result suggests that, rather than relying purely on heuristics, the human brain has learned to optimize eye movements in reading even at the fine-grained level of character-position targeting, reflecting efficiency-based sensitivity to ongoing cognitive processing.

中文翻译：

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持续的认知处理影响阅读中精确的眼球运动目标

阅读是一种高度复杂的学习技能，人类每秒钟将眼睛移动三到四次，以响应视觉和认知处理。普遍的观点是，这些快速眼球运动决定的细节——用扫视瞄准单词的哪个部分——完全由低级动眼神经启发式决定。但是，最有效的扫视目标对正在进行的单词识别很敏感，将眼睛移入一个单词的位置越远，它的识别已经进行得越远。在这里，我们使用隐蔽的文本转换范式，展示了阅读中的扫视目标与认知处理中的试验间变异性之间的统计关系。这个结果表明，与其纯粹依赖启发式方法，