ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we will review research addressing the influence of lexical variables in foveal and parafoveal vision. Clearly, this topic has relevance to a number of distinct issues in cognitive psychology. First, some of this research is relevant to the long-standing and controversial debate concerning conscious and unconscious semantic processing (see Holender, 1986, and the accompanying commentaries). Second, this research provides important information about how much (and what type of) information an individual can utilize when fixated at a particular location. Obviously, any model of visual word recognition must cope with the constraints imposed by varying levels of information utilization as a function of retinal eccentricity. Third, and most importantly, the utilization of parafoveal information is highly relevant to models of reading. Consider a reader fixated at a particular location in text. The reader has a clear and sharp visual representation for the foveal information, but how much and what types of information can the reader utilize to the right or left of fixation in parafoveal vision? As we will see, there are considerable differences across the different models of reading regarding this issue.
