SEAM: An Integrated Activation-Coupled Model of Sentence Processing and Eye Movements in Reading

Models of eye-movement control during reading, developed largely within psychology, usually focus on visual, attentional, and motor processes but neglect post-lexical language processing; by contrast, models of sentence comprehension processes, developed largely within psycholinguistics, generally focus only on post-lexical language processes. We present a model that combines these two research threads, by integrating eye-movement control and sentence processing. Developing such an integrated model is extremely challenging and computationally demanding, but such an integration is an important step toward complete mathematical models of natural language comprehension in reading. We combine the SWIFT model of eye-movement control (Engbert et al., Psychological Review, 112, 2005, pp. 777-813) with key components of the Lewis and Vasishth sentence processing model (Lewis and Vasishth, Cognitive Science, 29, 2005, pp. 375-419). This integration becomes possible, for the first time, due in part to recent advances in successful parameter identification in dynamical models, which allows us to investigate profile log-likelihoods for individual model parameters. We present a fully implemented proof-of-concept model demonstrating how such an integrated model can be achieved; our approach includes Bayesian model inference with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling as a key computational tool. The integrated model, SEAM, can successfully reproduce eye movement patterns that arise due to similarity-based interference in reading. To our knowledge, this is the first-ever integration of a complete process model of eye-movement control with linguistic dependency completion processes in sentence comprehension. In future work, this proof of concept model will need to be evaluated using a comprehensive set of benchmark data.

Discriminative Viewer Identification using Generative Models of Eye Gaze

We study the problem of identifying viewers of arbitrary images based on their eye gaze. Psychological research has derived generative stochastic models of eye movements. In order to exploit this background knowledge within a discriminatively trained classification model, we derive Fisher kernels from different generative models of eye gaze. Experimentally, we find that the performance of the classifier strongly depends on the underlying generative model. Using an SVM with Fisher kernel improves the classification performance over the underlying generative model.