Landolt paradigm as a Task design to study reading features in eyetracker : pilot study

Background and Aim : In this pilot research, we intend to study eye movements in the reading process and use a new paradigm to eliminate semantic and spelling effects. The Landolt paradigm has been used with strong evidence of structural studies in other languages. Due to fundamental differences in the Persian language, we have redesigned the eye tracker task with this paradigm. We use it to examine the pattern of eye movements while reading the standard text and following the same design with Landolt. The Eye trackers are devices that measure eye movements like fixation and saccade. In new systems, infrared beam is used for detecting the gaze in each sample rate, so we can measure the pattern of eye movements or even the visual attention. The Landolt paradigm is a visual scanning task intended to evoke reading-like eye-movements in the absence of orthographic or lexical information.Methods : For task design, all letters in sentences of the text are exchanged with closed Landolt rings. As a target for searching, random numbers of these circles change with open rings, Landolt symbol. We used the standard font of elementary school textbooks in size of 14 to create five standard three-line texts that contain words up to third-grade level. In the first place, for normalization, task was performed on adults and then on healthy children. Task contain five standard text and five Landolt that are the same with their texts. Participants must read the standard text load and in Landolt part they must count the circles. We investigate the speed and accuracy of reading, and compare the pattern of eye movements in two groups with eyetracker’s Heatmap and Gaze path.Results : The descriptive results show that the speed of eye movement on the texts is slower in children. and eyetracker’s Heatmaps illustrate different patterns, but both groups have more regressive saccades in reading with orthographic contents.Conclusion : Beside several differences in eye movement patterns between children and adults, there are a correlation between speed and error in both groups.

Keywords:

Landolt paradigm , eye tracker , reading