Eye-Tracking in Reading

Eye-tracking in reading records where readers look and for how long while they read text naturally, turning the eyes into a continuous index of comprehension. Reading is not a smooth glide but a sequence of brief fixations punctuated by rapid saccades and occasional regressions back to earlier words. By logging this pattern with millisecond precision, researchers derive measures — first-fixation duration, gaze duration, total reading time, regression-path duration, skipping rate — that reveal, region by region and stage by stage, where and how much the language system struggles. Established by Keith Rayner's research program, it is the gold-standard online measure of natural reading.