posted on 2019-04-24, 13:44authored byEsha Prakash, Rebecca J. McLean, Sarah J. White, Kevin B. Paterson, Irene Gottlob, Frank A. Proudlock
Purpose: Normal readers make immediate and precise adjustments in eye movements during
sentence reading in response to individual word features, such as lexical difficulty (e.g. common or
uncommon words) or word length. Our purpose was to assess the effect of infantile nystagmus (IN)
on these adaptive mechanisms.
Methods: Eye movements were recorded from 29 participants with IN (14 albinism, 12 idiopathic
and 3 congenital stationary night blindness) and 15 controls when reading sentences containing
either common / uncommon words or long / short target words. Parameters assessed included:
duration of first foveation / fixation, number of first-pass and percentage second-pass foveations /
fixations, percentage words skipped, gaze duration, acquisition time (gaze + non-gaze duration),
landing site locations, clinical and experimental reading speeds.
Results: Participants with IN could not modify first foveation durations in contrast to controls who
made longer first fixations on uncommon words (P<0.001). Participants with IN made more first-pass
foveations on uncommon and long words (P<0.001) to increase gaze durations. However, this also
increased non-gaze durations (P<0.001) delaying acquisition times. Participants with IN re-read
shorter words more often (P<0.005). Similar to controls, participants with IN landed more first
foveations between the start and center of long words. Reading speeds during experiments were
lower in IN participants compared to controls (P<0.01).
Conclusions: People with IN make more first-pass foveations on uncommon and long words
influencing reading speeds. This demonstrates that the ‘slow to see’ phenomenon occurs during
word reading in IN. These deficits were not captured by clinical reading charts.
Funding
Financial Support: Ulverscroft Foundation, Leicester, UK; Economic and Social Research Council, UK (ES/R008957/1); Nystagmus Network UK.
History
Citation
Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, 2019, 60(6), pp. 2226–2236
Author affiliation
/Organisation/COLLEGE OF LIFE SCIENCES/Biological Sciences/Neuroscience, Psychology and Behaviour
Version
VoR (Version of Record)
Published in
Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science
Publisher
Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO)