Tracking your emotions: An eye-tracking study on reader’s engagement with perspective during text comprehension

Abstract

An eye-tracking study explored perspective effects on eye-movements during reading. We presented texts that included either a personal perspective (you) or an onlooker perspective (he or she). We measured whether fixations on the pronouns themselves differed as a function of perspective, and whether fixations on pronouns were affected by the emotional valence of the text which was either positive or negative. It was found that early in the text, processing of you is easier than he or she. However, as the character referred to by he or she becomes more familiar, fixations on he or she decrease, specifically in negative contexts.