ABSTRACT
Many of the previous papers have emphasized hypotheses about changes in visual processing from peripheral and foveal retinal involvement to foveal processing alone or what I will call the shrinking functional visual field. I am going to describe data which I feel lend support to the assumption that the two processes described by Hochberg (1970b), i.e., peripheral search guidance and cognitive search guidance, are active. Basically, these are locating and identifying processes. Peripheral search guidance was hypothesized to be a process that is activated during eye movements and tuned to pick up contours (physical cues and features) in the periphery. Information about important cues and features is sent to a higher order processing unit, cognitive search guidance, for integration and meaning extraction. As meaning increases, the peripheral search guidance process interrogates larger areas of the text. The primary concern in the experiments was to examine the effects of manipulating two spatial features, namely, word shape and word boundary on reading and on search. These features are considered particularly relevant cues for the visual periphery during reading.
