Let’s take a look at active vision
Have you ever “seen” something that was not what you were looking at? By that I mean “have you ever been aware of something just outside your field of vision? It might have been a squirrel darting across the road in front of your car that you didn’t really “see” but managed to slow down for anyway. But the awareness that something is there whether you’re actively looking at it or not may, in fact, be the result of your eyes scanning the field of vision several times a second while you are unaware it’s happening.
Let’s look at reading. Do fluent readers fixate on each letter they see? Or do they take in the totality of the text? One test to determine this involves the “moving window” manipulation. This is used to determine the perceptual span in reading. If, by blocking the letters available on either side of the window, there is no effect on the speed of reading, the span of what we perceive is unaffected. BUT, if it DOES affect the speed of reading, we know the opposite is true. Turns out our spatial window is about 8-12 characters to the right of a word, but shorter than that to the left. Also turns out that the reverse is true if we’re reading Hebrew or another language routinely read from right to left.
How much are you taking in at a glance? Tune in tomorrow!
