ABSTRACT
The acuity limitations of the human eye are an important reason for why people make eye movements: by moving their eyes, people can realign the fovea with the region of the object that requires most visual attention. The parafoveal region plays a role in reading studies, where researchers invoke or study the nature of parafoveal processing and parafoveal-preview effects. Humans look around the environment to obtain high-quality visual information about distinct objects that may help them navigate the world. Active vision underscores the importance of eye movements across a range of different tasks. While a large body of work deals with eye movements during reading, reading is a very specific and highly specialized task. The global perceptual span or word length span is the entire region for which readers process low-level visual information, most notably word boundaries marked by interword spaces.
