Eye movements during multiple readings of the same text

People often read the same text more than once. Studying eye movements during multiple readings of the same texts provides a unique opportunity to observe the consistency of saccadic landing positions. Eye movements were recorded while 5 people read the same 4 texts more than 40 times, no more than 4 times/day, and never on consecutive trials. Other texts, read only once, were interspersed. Comprehension questions and a change-detection task helped maintain attention in the face of the repetition. There were two main findings: (1) repeated reading produced significant, but modest, changes in global saccadic patterns. The only change found in all readers was a reduction in the proportion of regressions. (2) Saccadic landing positions fell into clusters located at a variety of places with respect to word boundaries, and often across word boundaries. A mixed-strategy model of saccadic guidance (look to the center of words, while trying to maintain fairly uniform saccade lengths), could account for the overall strength of clustering, but not for the variability among cluster locations, suggesting that saccadic landing sites are selected in part on the basis of local text characteristics. The reliable clustering of saccadic landing positions found during multiple readings of the same text opens the way for cluster patterns to be used to study eye movement strategies during reading and overcome at least some of the variability associated with traditional global single-text measures.