Psychophysiological analysis of text reading and understanding

The individual characteristics of macrosaccades during the reading of fairy tales were measured, and the ability of subjects (students of liberal arts colleges) to demonstrate the understanding of the text (moral of tales) by writing a short summary was assessed. The abstracts were estimated by independent experts using a six-point scale. The preparation of the summary was not limited in time. Any relationship between the reading speed and the quality of text interpretation was not found. No relationship between the under-standing of the hidden moral and the number of characters captured in one fixation and the mean duration of macrosaccade was found either. Correlation analysis showed an inverse relationship between the number of returns and the understanding of the text: the grater the number of return macrosaccades, the worse the understanding of the text. An inverse relationship between the number of captured characters and the number of macrosaccades was found. The reading time of the text is directly correlated with the number of fixations. This means that the bandwidth of the visual communication channel per unit time is determined by the number of captured characters. The smaller the number of characters captured during fixation, the greater the reading time and the smaller the bandwidth of the eye per unit time.