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Eye Tracking Analysis

One of the tests that Dr. Lane uses to evaluate your child is the Electronic eye Trac. This machine records eye movements as a child reads. Reading involves using saccadic fixations to move our eyes across a line of print. Most people think that when we read, the brain takes in several words at a time. You will be surprised to know that even good readers do not average more than one word per fixation until tenth grade. In fact, the average first grade student only averages forty-five percent of a word per fixation (about two letters), the average fifth grader seventy-eight percent and first year college student 1.30 words per fixation. This is again due to the very narrow area of clear vision in the foveal area that has all the cones. How much we can see per each fixation when we read is called the “span of recognition.” To see how this works, look at a letter in a word and without moving your eyes, see how much you can really see from the right and left of the letter you are looking at. We can recognize the length of a word thirteen to fourteen positions to the right of the fixated letter, shape of a word ten to twelve positions to the right but can only identify for meaning four to six positions to the right of the letter you are looking at. Initially, all the visual information is available but since the brain cannot handle (identify) all of this, only the letters near the fixation point are identified. In fact, this window is asymmetric to the right as we read. This is not due to just acuity, but because visual attention is to the “right,” since we read to the right. A culture that reads to the left would have an asymmetric window to the left.

The eye movements used in reading are called saccadic fixations and a normal eye movement pattern would look like Figure 1.
Fig. 1

This looks like a staircase where the steps are the pauses (fixations) and the rest are the saccadic eye movements. A dyslexic child would look like Figure 2 where you can see very erratic eye movements and losses in fixation. To appreciate these figures, you need to know that the machine that records these eye movements works by light being reflected off of the eyes as the child reads to himself. The reflected light controls the pen on the moving chart paper. Therefore, when the eye moves, the pen also moves.
Fig. 2

There have been astounding success stories of children who have benefited from visual tracking and visual scanning procedures. One in particular is a college student Dr. Lane saw in 1990. Shawn was a sophomore in college and had a reading speed of only ninety words per minute. This is on a first grade level for reading speed.

Fig. 3 Figure 3 shows an eye-movement analysis record. The analysis is based on how many times a child rereads (regressions), how much he looks at for each fixation (span recognition), how many times he pauses to read (fixations) and how long it takes him to decode the word he is looking at (duration and fixation). The average of what is expected for each grade level is located at the top of the chart and goes from grade 1 through college. You can see in Figure 3 that on 5/22/90 Shawn had to pause 231 times and reread 74 per 100 words. Figure 4 shows Shawn’s Eye-trac record for 5/22/90.
Fig. 4

Shawn went through a rigorous visual training program designed to improve his eye tracking and visual scanning skills. When Shawn graduated from Dr. Lane’s program in April, 1991, his reading speed increased to 260 words per minute. You can see in Figure 5 how much his eye movements had improved.
Fig. 5

You will notice on the Eye Trac record in Figure 3 that his duration of fixation did not improve. This means that he did not improve in speed of recognition of what he was reading but greatly improved in the number of times he had to reread and the amount of information he was able to focus on at one time. His rereading per 100 words was reduced from 74 to 15 and his span of recognition from forty-three percent of a word to 1.2 words per fixation. In other words, it took him just as long to decode what he was looking at but by decreasing his rereading and increasing the amount of visual information he was able to see, Dr. Lane increased his reading speed from 90 words per minute to 260 words per minute.