The situation model in text reading: Evidence from an eye movement study

Abstract

Understanding and processing of information in text reading have been the core content of the reading psychological research, and it is a hot topic of great concern in cognitive science community. In this study, we used eye tracking to investigate the cognitive mechanisms during peoples reading of narratives and statistical information, and we explored the differences in behavior of people during their reading of different text information from the human cognitive behavior. This study confirmed previous view that the natural process of text reading is a dual processing process of coherent reading and focus reading, and different material characteristics might trigger different information processing activities. We found that the construction of situation model contributed to text reading, which provided some evidences for the situation model from fixation point distribution.