Tracking older adults' eye movement while reading

描述(申请人提供)：拟议的调查使用眼动技术来研究阅读中的年龄差异。增加对阅读和阅读理解方面的年龄差异的了解，对于提高老年人对重要且往往复杂的材料的理解至关重要，这些材料包括书面医疗信息和说明、治疗计划、知情同意书、保险表格和其他类似材料。眼动技术已被证明对研究阅读过程中的群体和个人差异非常重要，因为眼动对影响阅读的认知因素特别敏感。我们建议使用不同的分心阅读范式(Connelly，Hasher，&Zack，1991)来比较年轻人和老年人在阅读带有干扰词和短语的文本时的眼动模式。虽然这不是一项典型的阅读任务，但它是一种有用的方法，可以用来测试影响注意力分配的因素如何影响阅读和理解。老年人阅读课文的速度通常比年轻人慢，对所读内容的理解也更差。为了解释这些差异，我们结合了抑制性赤字理论(Hasher&Zack，1988)、编码赤字理论(Craik&Byrd，1985)和Craik的环境支持概念(例如，1986)的预测。本研究设计了六个实验来测试阅读和阅读理解中年龄差异的抑制和编码解释。在句子和语篇中，分心词的显著程度、分心词的长度(词数)、分心词与目标段落的语义关系、分心词的意义以及分心词位置的可预测性都有所不同。这些研究的结果将有助于更全面地解释年龄差异，完善抑制缺陷假说，并导致对阅读年龄差异背后的过程有更好的理解。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The proposed investigation employs eye movement technology to study age differences in reading. Increased knowledge about age differences in reading and reading comprehension will be critical for improving older adults' understanding of important and often complex materials such as written medical information and instructions, treatment plans, informed consent forms, insurance forms, and other similar materials. Eye movement technology has proven to be important for studying group and individual differences in reading processes because eye movements are especially sensitive to cognitive factors affecting reading. We propose to use variations on the reading with distraction paradigm (Connelly, Hasher, & Zacks, 1991) to compare young and older adults' pattern of eye movements while reading texts with interposed distracting words and phrases. Although not a typical reading task, this method is useful as a way to test how reading and comprehension are affected by factors influencing the allocation of attention. Older adults typically read texts more slowly than young adults and have poorer comprehension of what they have read. In an effort to explain these differences, we combine the predictions of the inhibitory deficit theory (Hasher & Zacks, 1988), encoding deficit theory (Craik & Byrd, 1985), and Craik's (e.g., 1986) notions of environmental support. Six experiments are proposed to test inhibition and encoding accounts of age differences in reading and reading comprehension. We vary distracter salience, distracter length (number of words), semantic relation of distracter to target passage, distracter meaningfulness, and predictability of distracter location, in both sentence and text passages. Findings from these studies will permit a more complete account of age differences and a refinement of the inhibitory deficit hypothesis, and lead to a greater understanding of the processes underlying age differences in reading.