What determines where readers fixate next? Leveraging NLP to investigate human cognition

During reading, readers perform rapid forward and backward eye movements through text, called saccades. How these saccades are targeted in the text is not yet fully known, particularly regarding the role of higher-order linguistic processes in guiding eye-movement behaviour in naturalistic reading. Current models of eye movement simulation in reading either limit the role of high-order linguistic information or lack explainability and cognitive plausibility. In this study, we investigate the influence of linguistic information on saccade targeting, ie determining where to move our eyes next, by predicting which word is fixated next based on a limited processing window that resembles the amount of information humans readers can presumably process in parallel within the visual field at each fixation. Our preliminary results suggest that, while word length and frequency are important factors for determining the target of forward saccades, the contextualized meaning of the previous sequence, as well as whether the context word had been fixated before and the distance of the previous saccade, are important factors for predicting backward saccades.