Reading with a salient optimal viewing-position letter: attentional but no oculomotor capture

In visual search, both abrupt onsets as well as static singletons have the ability to capture attention (independent of the goals of the observer) and also elicit exogenous (involuntary, stimulus-driven) saccades (Godijn & Theeuwes, 2003). Thus, automatic attentional capture is frequently accompanied by oculomotor capture. We investigated whether it is possible to induce and take advantage of automatic oculomotor capture in single-sentences reading. In an eye-movement experiment, for selected words the optimal landing letter close to the center of the word was marked in red whereas the other letters were presented in black. The red letters were expected to act as salient exogenous stimuli that automatically attract the eyes. Such oculomotor capture should reduce the standard deviation of landing position distributions. Analyses based on fixation durations, landing positions distributions, and refixation probability curves suggested that there was attentional, but no oculomotor capture.