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Japanese particles have been studied syntactically and semantically in connection with preceding words for constructing sentence, and studied in terms of predicate in connection with core meaning of the noun. However, the role of particles in the field of reading has not clearly been explained. This dissertation investigates the role of Japanese particles for L2 and L1 readers reading aloud through the following questions: (1) In what ways do L 2 and L1 Japanese readers miscue on particles? (2) Why do L2 and L1 Japanese readers elongate the phoneme of the particle? (3) How do L2 and L1 Japanese readers' eye movements show fixation points on particles? (4) How do L2 and L1's Japanese readers' miscues of particles relate to the L2 and L1 readers' eye movements? (5) How do L2 and L1 readers' fixation points on particles relate to elongation? (6) How do L2 and L1 Japanese readers' fixation points relate to miscues and elongation? Five L2 and four L1 readers read a Japanese story that included 121 particles. By looking at miscues, the results show the segmentation process using particles. This segmentation process minimizes the number of particle miscues. Substitution, omission, and insertion miscues occur in a complex manner because they are related to finding word boundaries. Elongation occurs as a process of prediction and confirmation for making sense. L2 readers use elongation with miscues more often than L1 readers. In eye movement research, L2 reader's miscues are more highly connected to eye fixation than are L1 readers' miscues. Eye fixation points and elongation are used for prediction and confirmation for making sense. However, L1 readers' miscues mainly consist of fixation without elongation. L2 readers use more particles while L1 readers use more flexible construction with the meaning of adjacent words playing an important role. Readers do not just fixate, but also elongate particles to get information. The result shows that readers use miscues on particles, elongation, and eye fixations as complex processes to construct a meaningful text.

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When you want to pick up an object, it is usually a simple matter to reach out to its location, and accurately pick it up. Almost every action in such a sequence is guided and checked by vision, with eye movements usually preceding motor actions (Hayhoe & Ballard, 2005; Hayhoe, Shrivastava, Mruczek, & Pelz, 2003). However, most research in this area has been concerned about the sequence of movements in complex “everyday” tasks like making tea or tool use. Less emphasis has been placed on the object itself and where on it the eye and hand movements land, and how gaze behaviour is different when generating a perceptual response to that same object. For those studies that have, very basic geometric shapes have been used such as rectangles, crosses and triangles. In everyday life, however, there are a range of problems that must be computed that go beyond such simple objects. Objects typically have complex contours, different textures or surface properties, and variations in their centre of mass. Accordingly, the primary goals in conducting this research were three fold: (1) To provide a deeper understanding of the function of gaze in perception and action when interacting with simple and complex objects (Experiments 1a, 1b, 1c); (2) To examine how gaze and grasp behaviours are influenced when you dissociate important features of an object such as the COM and the horizontal centre of the block (Experiments 2a, 2c); and (3) To explore whether perceptual biases will influence grasp and gaze behaviours (Experiment 2b). The results from the current series of studies showed the influence of action (i.e., the potential to act) on perception in terms of where we look on an object, and vice versa, the influence of perceptual biases on action output (i.e. grasp locations). In addition, grasp locations were found to be less sensitive to COM changes than previously suggested (for example see Kleinholdermann, Brenner, Franz, & Smeets, 2007), whereas fixation locations were drawn towards the ‘visual’ COM of objects, as shown in other perceptual studies (for example see He & Kowler, 1991; Kowler & Blaser, 1995; McGowan, Kowler, Sharma, & Chubb, 1998; Melcher & Kowler, 1999; Vishwanath & Kowler, 2003, 2004; Vishwanath, Kowler, & Feldman, 2000), even when a motor response was required. The implications of these results in terms of vision for Perception and vision for Action are discussed.

In this dissertation, we study the relationship between eye movements and visual attention. Different types of eye movements are investigated including microsaccades, eye fixation, and eye pursuit. First, we demonstrate that microsaccades occur during pursuit and they are linked to covert attention shifts. Employing a psychophysical task that involves covert attention shifts to a peripheral square, we detect if microsaccades occur during eye pursuit, and, if so, whether, and in what way, microsaccades are related to attention shifts. Microsaccades are found to occur during pursuit and they present in similar patterns as those occurring during eye fixation. We discover that microsaccades tend to be biased towards the same direction as pursuit and the bias increases with increases of pursuit velocities. Through the analysis of microsaccade orientation and latency, we argue that microsaccades occurring during pursuit, rather than being randomly distributed, have a link with covert attention shifts. This is consistent with what has been reported for microsaccades occurring during fixation. Further analysis of microsaccade amplitude supports this argument. The potential attention mechanisms for the characteristics of microsaccades are discussed. We suggest that the attention allocation during pursuit is responsible for the characteristics of microsaccades. Our analyses of microsaccades also enforce the argument that microsaccades may be the suppressed saccades. / In addition to microsaccades, the attention allocation during eye fixation and eye pursuit are considered as well. We demonstrate that, during eye fixation, the local image content around the area of a fixation point is a significant factor to influence the fixation duration. However, during pursuit, the pursuit direction, rather than image contents, is important to decide attention allocation. According to these results, a top-down attention model based on types of eye movements is built. Three types of eye movements are considered separately in the model. They are eye fixation, eye pursuit, and saccadic eye movements (including microsaccades). The model is applied to the design of an interactive 2D video game. We demonstrate that the game is successfully designed in different difficulty levels through the analysis of attention allocation by our attention model. Our results imply that the attention modeling can be used to alter the game play so as to provide varying difficulty levels and it is also promising to take advantage of eye tracking data for broader applications, such as for navigation, intelligent map searching, augmented reality, and others.

We have a strong intuition that people's eyes are unique, socially informative stimuli. As such, it is reasonable to propose that humans have developed a fundamental tendency to preferentially attend to eyes in the environment. The empirical evidence to support this intuition is, however, remarkably thin. Over the course of eight chapters, the present thesis considers the area of social attention, and what special role (if any) the selection of eyes has in it. Chapters 2 and 3 demonstrate that when observers are shown complex natural scenes, they look at the eyes more frequently than any other region. This selection preference is enhanced when the social content and activity in the scene is high, and when the task is to report on the attentional states in the scene. Chapters 4 and 5 establish that the bias to select eyes extends to a variety of tasks, suggesting that it may be fundamental to human social attention. In addition, Chapter 5 shows that observers who are told that they will have to remember the scenes look more often at the eyes than observers who are unaware of the forthcoming memory test; moreover this difference between groups persists to scene recognition. Chapter 6 examines whether the preference for eyes can be explained by visual saliency. It cannot. Chapter 7 compares the selection of eyes to another socially communicative cue, the arrow. The results shed light on a recent controversy in the social attention field, and indicate again that there is a fundamental bias to select the eyes. Collectively the data suggest that for typically developing adults, eyes are rich, socially communicative stimuli that are preferentially attended to relative to other stimuli in the environment.

By using eye movement monitoring (EMM) techniques, investigators have been able to examine the processes that support relational memory as they occur online. However, EMM studies have only focused on memory for spatial relations, producing a lack of EMM evidence for temporal relations. Thus, in the present study, participants performed a recognition memory task with stimuli that varied in their spatial and temporal relations. They were presented with a sequence of objects in a unique spatial configuration, and were instructed to either detect changes in the spatial or temporal relations between study and test presentations. The results provide novel EMM evidence for an interaction between spatial and temporal memory, and the obligatory effects of relational memory processes on eye movement behaviours. Moreover, the current study was also able to test predictions from the temporal context model (Howard & Kahana, 2002), and found evidence for a temporal contiguity effect.

Theories of age-related memory decline debate whether the problem lies at the level of encoding or consciously accessing information at the level of retrieval. Deficits at encoding may be due to the inability to bind relations among objects. The present research implements eye movement monitoring into an associative memory task to explore age-related memory at encoding and retrieval. Eye movements of older and younger adults are compared. Three solitary items were presented during the study phase, and test responses were whether the spatial relation of these objects to one another was intact or manipulated when subsequently presented all together. Observed differences at the level of encoding in addition to the level of retrieval clarifies that there is not a deficit in consciously accessing encoded representations. Further, differences in relational binding at the level of encoding were observed, which supports the association deficit theory of memory and aging.

By using eye movement monitoring (EMM) techniques, investigators have been able to examine the processes that support relational memory as they occur online. However, EMM studies have only focused on memory for spatial relations, producing a lack of EMM evidence for temporal relations. Thus, in the present study, participants performed a recognition memory task with stimuli that varied in their spatial and temporal relations. They were presented with a sequence of objects in a unique spatial configuration, and were instructed to either detect changes in the spatial or temporal relations between study and test presentations. The results provide novel EMM evidence for an interaction between spatial and temporal memory, and the obligatory effects of relational memory processes on eye movement behaviours. Moreover, the current study was also able to test predictions from the temporal context model (Howard & Kahana, 2002), and found evidence for a temporal contiguity effect.