AbstractsPsychology

This dissertation pursues a computationally rational analysis of eye movements in a simple list-reading task. The strength of the computationally rational approach is in the ability to explain why certain phenomena may emerge under the assumption that behavior is an approximately optimal adaptation to the joint constraints of an organism's intrinsic computational constraints and task demands. The provided theory and model integrates a framework of lexical processing as active perception (Norris, 2006) with oculomotor constraints derived from a broad-coverage model of eye movement control in reading (Reichle, Warren & McConnell 2009). The first portion of the thesis provides experimental evidence of adaptation of fixation durations to quantitatively-expressed payoffs in a simple reading task, and adaptation in the model on the same dimension. The second portion explores spillover lexical frequency effects in the same framework and how they may emerge from a model that can adaptively allocate processing resources to information drawn from perception (foveal or parafoveal), or memory. In addition to implications for eye movement control in reading, these findings can be interpreted to bear on task adaptation in reading, as well as the adaptive use of perception and memory in a sequential sampling framework.