Grace Sinclair¹, Joseph Schmidt¹; ¹University of Central Florida

Navigating via signage or searching for specific words involves aspects of reading and visual search. Both tasks involve peripheral pre-processing that informs upcoming eye movements. However, these tasks require different oculomotor behaviors, search typically exhibits a leftward attentional bias (Durgin et al., 2008), whereas left-to-right readers preferentially spread attention rightward to integrate upcoming textual information (Schotter et al, 2012; Rayner, 1998). We asked if larger perceptual span sizes in reading (the area from which visuospatial information is extracted from the upcoming text outside of central vision; McConkie & Rayner, 1975) predict increased guidance of spatial attention to target words (as measured by the proportion of trials where the target was fixated first) during a visual search task. We predicted stronger associations at near eccentricities and on the right side of space due to the rightward spread of attention during left-to-right reading. Observers read through sentences with various gaze-contingent moving window sizes while eye movements were tracked to obtain span size. They then searched through arrays containing one target word and five distractor words. We found that larger span sizes result in stronger guidance on the right side of space, and the leftward search guidance bias was only present for individuals with smaller span sizes. This suggests that there is a partially common attentional mechanism, and larger span size provides a compensatory mechanism that results in more similar search guidance on each side of space. Next, we asked if this relationship extended to non-linguistic searches. To assess this, we repeated the study with search arrays containing one real-world target object and five categorically distinct distractors. Early results suggest that the relationship may not extend to non-linguistic information. This demonstrates that readers with larger spans may use linguistic information more effectively, but this advantage does not extend to other types of searches.