Practice calculating reading times

Practice calculating reading times (1-2 hours)

Now you know some reading measures, practice calculating various reading measures from a real dataset. Below I have shown you the pattern of eye movements and fixations over one sentence, and I want you to calculate several different reading time measures. I encourage you to work with one or more partners.

Unlike most exercises in this subject, for this test there are specific correct answers. Don't move on to the rest of the module until you are able to answer the below test questions correctly (the correct answers are listed at the bottom of this page).

The data

Here's another sample eye-tracking result. In this case, I'm also showing you how many milliseconds each fixation lasted. Again, I'm showing the results in both a picture and a table.

Another image showing a sample pattern of eye movements. See text below for a text-format, machine-readable table of the results

Fixation 1	175 ms
Fixation 2		202 ms
Fixation 3			118 ms
Fixation 4				492 ms
Fixation 5		326 ms
Fixation 6				288 ms
Fixation 7					706 ms
Fixation 8					383 ms
Fixation 9			421 ms
Fixation 10				512 ms
Fixation 11					111 ms
Fixation 12						367 ms
Fixation 13					545 ms
Fixation 4						862 ms
	The	busy girl	saw	the bank	was closed	that afternoon

I want to know how long people took to read the phrase was closed. Below I have listed several different reading time measures; some of them are ones you read about in the previous question, and some are totally new. (Beneath each one I have included a brief explanation of what it means.) Calculate each reading time measure and fill in the blank.

First fixation time: _____ ms
- duration of the first fixation on this word or group of words
First pass time: _____ ms
- sum of all fixations on this region, from the first time this region was looked at until the first time this region was left (in either direction)
Go-past time: _____ ms
- sum of all fixations on any region, from the first time this region was looked at until the first time this region was gone past
Second-pass time: _____ ms
- sum of all fixations on the region from the second time the region was looked at (after being left once) until the second time it was looked away from
Rereading time: _____ ms
- sum of all fixations on the region after the region was gone past at least once
Total time: _____ ms
- sum of all fixations on the region

When you have finished these activities, continue to the next section of the module: "Reflection on eye-tracking for reading".

Answers: first fixation time: 706ms; first pass time: 1089ms; go-past time: 2133ms; second pass time: 111ms; rereading time: 545ms; total time: 1745ms.

by Stephen Politzer-Ahles. Last modified on 2021-05-14. CC-BY-4.0.