Individual Differences of How Attention is Allocated During Reading

The current study replicates a previous finding of how attention is allocated during reading and was expanded upon by controlling for individual differences between participants. An eye-tracking experiment was performed to determine how attention is allocated during reading, while individual differences between participants were recorded by measuring working memory capacity. In four tasks that increased in depth of processing, participants were instructed to correctly identify whether or not a target was presented in a series of 1-4 words. Results indicate a relationship between reaction time and working memory score in all but one task. This suggests that high-span individuals use parallel processing when detecting symbols or orthographic features, but use serial processing during tasks that require full semantic processing