Complexity of Eye Movements in Reading

During reading, our eyes perform complicated sequences of fixations on words. Stochastic models of eye movement control suggest that this seemingly erratic behavior can be attributed to noise in the oculomotor system and random fluctuations in lexical processing. Here, we present a qualitative analysis of a recently published dynamical model [Engbert et al., 2002] and propose that deterministic nonlinear control accounts for much of the observed complexity of eye movement patterns during reading. Based on a symbolic coding technique we analyze robust statistical features of simulated fixation sequences.