ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors describe how solved methodological problems encountered when taking discontinous eye movement records during reading of extended discourse. The technique of measuring recall has been successful in supporting the interactionist view, but it has been limited by its inability to separate responses during recall from responses during reading. The raw data for Karsh and Breitenbach’s demonstration was taken on the TV-based eye movement monitoring system at the human engineering laboratory while college students searched for target numbers. The errors of overestimating number of words fixated and of underestimating fixation durations are related. Some of the raw data points are sampled while the eyes are making a saccadic jump over a word. Traditional global measures consisting of parameters averaged over entire passages are available, but are clearly too gross with respect to our goal of measuring components of intra-passage flexibility.
