Jukka Hyönä

University of Turku | UTU · Department of Psychology and Speech-Language Pathology

The study of the cortical basis of reading has greatly benefited from the use of naturalistic paradigms that permit eye movements. However, due to the short stimulus lengths used in most naturalistic reading studies, it remains unclear how reading of texts comprising more than isolated sentences modulates cortical processing. To address this questi...

Sociability is central for humans. Visual information ranging from low-level physical features (e.g. luminance) to semantic information (e.g. face recognition) and high-level social inference (e.g. emotional valence of social interactions) is constantly sampled for navigating the social world. Here we utilize large-scale eye tracking during natural...

BACKGROUND Fear promotes rapid detection of threats and appropriate fight-or-flight responses. The endogenous opioid system modulates responses to pain and psychological stressors. Opioid agonists also have also anxiolytic effects. Fear and anxiety constitute major psychological stressors for humans, yet the contribution of the opioid system to acu...

The study examined whether word-level eye-movement patterns in text reading can be predicted by individual differences in foveal and parafoveal word processing efficiency. Individual differences in lexical skills were gauged by presenting words and pseudowords with short exposure times in the fovea (30–60 ms) and at varying eccentricities in the pa...

Multiple object tracking (MOT) and multiple identity tracking (MIT) each measure the ability to track moving objects visually. While prior investigators have mainly compared athletes and non-athletes on MOT, MIT more closely resembles dynamic real-life environments. Here we compared the performance of handball players with non-athletes on both MOT...

Two eye-tracking experiments in alphabetic Finnish and two in logographic Chinese examined the recognition of two-constituent compound words in reading. In Finnish, two-constituent compound words vary greatly in length, whereas in Chinese they are identical in length. According to the visual acuity principle (Bertram & Hyönä, 2003), short Finnish c...

A common goal for gender-fair language policies is to promote terms that elicit balanced activation of gender categories. Expanding previous research on the activation of feminine versus masculine categories through person nouns, we used a word-picture response priming design with gendered human faces as target stimuli, to explore whether a simulta...

Large‐scale integration of information across cortical structures, building on neural connectivity, has been proposed to be a key element in supporting human cognitive processing. In electrophysiological neuroimaging studies of reading, quantification of neural interactions has been limited to the level of isolated words or sentences due to artefac...

Liversedge, Drieghe, Li, Yan, Bai and Hyönä (2016) reported an eye movement study that investigated reading in Chinese, Finnish and English (languages with markedly different orthographic characteristics). Analyses of the eye movement records showed robust differences in fine grained characteristics of eye movements between languages, however, over...

The normative, developmental changes in affect-biased attention during the preschool years are largely unknown. To investigate the attention bias for emotional versus neutral faces, an eye-tracking measurement and free viewing of paired pictures of facial expressions (i.e., happy, fearful, sad, or angry faces) and nonface pictures with neutral face...

Large-scale integration of information across cortical structures, building on neural connectivity, has been proposed to be a key element in supporting human cognitive processing. In electrophysiological neuroimaging studies of reading, quantification of neural interactions has been limited to the level of isolated words or sentences due to artefac...

Background: In previous studies, an attention bias for signals of fear and threat has been related to socioemotional problems, such as anxiety symptoms, and socioemotional competencies, such as altruistic behaviors in children, adolescents and adults. However, previous studies lack evidence about these relations among infants and toddlers. Aims:...

Research often conceptualises complex social factors as being distinct binary categories (e.g., female vs male, feminine vs masculine). While this can be appropriate, the addition of an ‘overlapping’ category (e.g., non-binary, gender neutral) can contextualise the ‘binary’, both for participants (allowing more complex conceptualisations of the cat...

Peri-hand space (PHS) can be extended to space near tools used in everyday life, indicating that the space near the functional area of a tool acquires more spatial attention, which may be affected by tool experience. In previous studies, effects of extensive experience in tool use on the allocation of spatial attention near a tool have not been inv...

The perceived gender ratio of 422 role nouns was evaluated by Chinese- (N = 80), Finnish- (N = 77), and Russian-speaking (N = 134) students using an 11-point rating scale with counterbalanced scale anchors. Data were collected online between 2015 and 2019, via a self-administered questionnaire. The dataset contains all role nouns in English togethe...

Reading of alphabetic writing systems, such as English, has been extensively studied and most theories and models of reading are based on findings from these studies. This practice raises a practical question regarding whether findings from alphabetic writing systems can be extended to other writing systems, such as Korean or Chinese, and a more fu...

In this study, we investigated developmental aspects of eye movements during reading of three languages (English, German, and Finnish) that vary widely in their orthographic complexity and predictability. Grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules are rather complex in English and German but relatively simple in Finnish. Despite their differences in com...

In this study, we examined different models of cognitive control in dynamic time-sharing situations. We investigated attentional allocation by registering participants’ eye movements while they performed a new time-sharing task that forced them to solve resource conflicts between subtasks through prioritization. Participants were monitoring four su...

One of the most representative morpho-phonological features of Finnish is the existence of vowel harmony. Back vowels (a, o, and u) and front vowels (ä, ö, and y) cannot appear in the same monomorphemic word (e.g., PÖYTÄ [table] but not POYTÄ)-the vowels e and i are considered "neutral" and can accompany either front or back vowels (e.g., PELÄSTYÄ...

Mental health problems like anxiety, depression, and stress have been increasing in many countries and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated their toll. Mindfulness-based interventions have been shown to provide evidence-based treatments for anxiety and depression, and accumulating evidence is emerging in support of using mindfulness a...

Thirty participants tracked auditorily moving sound sources to estimate the capacity for multiple identity tracking by hearing. The participants sat blindfolded in a gym hall. Four assistants moved about semi-randomly in a circular area around the participant and constantly repeated a proper name. Two to four of the assistants were designated as th...

Previous studies (Hyönä, Yan, & Vainio, 2018; Yan et al., 2014) have demonstrated that in morphologically rich languages a word's morphological status is processed parafoveally to be used in modulating saccadic programming in reading. In the present parafoveal preview study conducted in Finnish, we examined the exact nature of this effect by compar...

To investigate the role of early regulatory problems (RP), such as problems in feeding, sleeping, and calming down during later development, the association between parent-reported RP at 3 months (no-RP, n = 110; RP, n = 66) and attention to emotional faces at 8 months was studied. Eight-month-old infants had a strong tendency to look at faces and...

In two eye-tracking studies, reading of two-character Chinese compound words was examined. First and second character frequency were orthogonally manipulated to examine the extent to which Chinese compound words are processed via the component characters. In Experiment 1, first and second character frequency were manipulated for frequent compound w...

The aim of the present study was to examine effects of relevance instructions and elaborative interrogation on the processing of and memory for expository texts. Eye movements of 132 undergraduate students were tracked while they read expository texts. After reading each text, they produced an oral summary. Participants were divided into two four e...

Occlusion is one of the main challenges in tracking multiple moving objects. In almost all real-world scenarios, a moving object or a stationary obstacle occludes targets partially or completely for a short or long time during their movement. A previous study (Zelinsky & Todor, 2010) reported that subjects make timely saccades toward the object in...

Emotivism in moral psychology holds that making moral judgements is at least partly an affective process. Three emotivist hypotheses can be distinguished: the elicitation hypothesis (that moral transgressions elicit emotions); the amplification hypothesis (that disgust amplifies moral judgments); and the moralisation hypothesis (that affect moralis...

An eye-tracking experiment examined the recognition of novel and lexicalized compound words during sentence reading. The frequency of the head noun in modifier-head compound words was manipulated to tap into the degree of compositional processing. This was done separately for long (12–16 letter) and short (7-9 letters) compound words. Based on the...

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the extent to which the lexical tone can affect spoken-word recognition in Chinese using a printed-word paradigm. Participants were presented with a visual display of four words—namely, a target word (e.g., 象限, xiang4xian4, “quadrant”), a tone-consistent phonological competitor (e.g., 相册, xiang4ce4, “ph...

The present chapter is a brief introduction to research on eye movements during reading. In the chapter, we will describe what the eye movement methodology has revealed about word recognition, syntactic parsing of sentences, and comprehension of longer segments of text. The typical eye movement pattern in reading is one where the reader makes a seq...

Emotivism in moral psychology holds that making moral judgements is at least partly an affective process. Three emotivist hypotheses can be distinguished: the elicitation hypothesis (that moral transgressions elicit emotions); the amplification hypothesis (that disgust amplifies moral judgments); and the moralization hypothesis (that affect moraliz...

Effects of task instructions and topic signaling on text processing among adult readers with different reading styles were studied by eye-tracking. In Experiment 1, readers read two multiple-topic expository texts guided either by a summary or a verification task. In Experiment 2, readers read a text with or without the topic sentences underlined....

We review all published eye-tracking studies to date that have used eye movements to examine multiple object (MOT) or multiple identity tracking (MIT). In both tasks, observers dynamically track multiple moving objects. In MOT the objects are identical, whereas in MIT they have distinct identities. In MOT, observers prefer to fixate on blank space,...

In two experiments, participants tracked the identity and location of moving words. The task bears resemblance to one performed by air traffic controllers who track multiple moving aircraft, where they are identified with relatively complex alphanumeric call signs. In Experiment 1, stimulus familiarity was manipulated by comparing the tracking of f...

The present study investigated whether during tracking of multiple moving objects with distinct identities only one identity is tracked at each moment (serial tracking) or whether multiple identities can be tracked simultaneously (parallel tracking). By adopting the gaze-contingent display change technique, we manipulated in real time the presence/...

We examined how infants’ attentional disengagement from happy, fearful, neutral, and phase‐scrambled faces at 8 months, as assessed by eye tracking, is associated with trajectories of maternal depressive symptoms from early pregnancy to 6 months postpartum (decreasing n = 48, increasing n = 34, and consistently low symptom levels n = 280). The samp...

Background: Biases in socio-emotional attention may be early markers of risk for self-regulation difficulties and mental illness. We examined the associations between maternal pre- and postnatal anxiety symptoms and infant attention patterns to faces, with particular focus on attentional biases to threat, across male and female infants. Methods: A...

This study investigated the time course of activation of orthographic information in spoken word recognition with two visual world eye-tracking experiments in a task where second language (L2) spoken word forms had to be matched with their printed referents. Participants ( n = 64) were native Finnish learners of L2 French ranging from beginners to...

Multiple-identity tracking (MIT) is a dynamic task in which observers track multiple moving objects of distinct identities and then report the location of each target object. The present study examined participant’ eye movements during MIT in order to investigate the relationship between eye movements and attentional performance during the task. Th...

Multiple-identity tracking (MIT) is a dynamic task in which observers track multiple moving objects of distinct identities and then report the location of each target object. The present study examined participant’ eye movements during MIT in order to investigate the relationship between eye movements and attentional performance during the task. Th...

Two lexical priming experiments were conducted to examine effects of grammatical structure of Chinese two-constituent compounds on their recognition. The target compound words conformed to two types of grammatical structure: subordinate and coordinative compounds. Subordinate compounds follow a structure where the first constituent modifies the sec...

Two lexical decision experiments were conducted to study the recognition of two-character Chinese monomorphemic and compound words by adult native Chinese readers. In Experiment 1, the words appeared non-spaced, whereas in Experiment 2 a space was inserted between the two characters. An interaction between word type and spacing reflects a trend for...

Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments investigating pronoun resolution in Finnish examined the time course of implicit causality information relative to both grammatical role and order-of-mention information. Experiment 1 showed an effect of implicit causality that appeared at the same time as the first-mention preference. Furthermore, when we...

We describe the Multilanguage Written Picture Naming Dataset. This gives trial-level data and time and agreement norms for written naming of the 260 pictures of everyday objects that compose the colorized Snodgrass and Vanderwart picture set (Rossion&Pourtois in Perception, 33, 217–236, 2004). Adult participants gave keyboarded re- sponses in their...

We investigated whether and how emotional facial expressions affect sustained attention in face tracking. In a multiple-identity and object tracking paradigm, participants tracked multiple target faces that continuously moved around together with several distractor faces, and subsequently reported where each target face had moved to. The emotional...

The preferred viewing location in words (Rayner, 1979) during reading is near the word center. Parafoveal word length information is utilized to guide the eyes toward it. A recent study of Yan et al. (2014) demonstrated that the word’s morphological structure may also be used in saccadic targeting. The study was conducted in a morphologically rich...

Sustained multifocal attention for moving targets requires binding object identities with their locations. The brain mechanisms of identity-location binding during attentive tracking have remained unresolved. In 2 functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments, we measured participants' hemodynamic activity during attentive tracking of multiple...

Some investigators argue that visual tracking is based on a parallel mechanism, others argue that tracking contains a serial component. In Experiment 1, we put previous theories into a direct test by registering observers' eye movements when they tracked identical moving targets or when they tracked distinct object identities. We found a qualitativ...

Our purpose was to examine whether present sound insulation guidelines of private office rooms provide optimal cognitive performance and acoustic satisfaction. 32 voluntary students participated in our laboratory experiment. The experiment simulated two adjacent office rooms. Speaker was in room 1 and listener in room 2. Both sound insulation betwe...

The use of orthographic and phonological information in spoken word recognition was studied in a visual world task where L1 Finnish learners of L2 French (n = 64) and L1 French native speakers (n = 24) were asked to match spoken word forms with printed words while their eye movements were recorded. In Experiment 1, French target words were contrast...

The present study investigated whether and how facial attractiveness affects sustained attention. We adopted a multiple-identity tracking paradigm, using attractive and unattractive faces as stimuli. Participants were required to track moving target faces amid distractor faces and report the final location of each target. In Experiment 1, the attra...

In this study, we used eye‐tracking methodology for deeper understanding of the refutation text effect on online text comprehension. A refutation text acknowledges the reader's alternative conceptions about a phenomenon, refutes them and presents the correct conceptions. We tested two hypotheses about its facilitation effect: the coherence hypothes...

Effects of background speech on reading were examined by playing aloud different types of background speech, while participants read long, syntactically complex and less complex sentences embedded in text. Readers' eye movement patterns were used to study online sentence comprehension. Effects of background speech were primarily seen in rereading t...

The file contains the data of all four experiments in different worksheets. (XLS)

How do we track multiple moving objects in our visual environment? Some investigators argue that tracking is based on a parallel mechanism (e.g., Cavanagh & Alvarez, 2005; Pylyshyn, 1989), others argue that tracking contains a serial component (e.g. Holcombe & Chen, 2013; Oksama & Hyönä, 2008). In the present study, we put previous theories into a...

During real-world vision observers often need to attend and track several moving objects. Sometimes the objects also have different identities (such as individual players in a football game), thus the observer needs to bind the object identities to their movement trajectories to know where each object is currently located. It has been proposed that...

Finnish ABC books present words with hyphens inserted at syllable boundaries. Syllabification by hyphens is abandoned in the 2nd grade for bisyllabic words, but continues for words with three or more syllables. The current eye movement study investigated how and to what extent syllable hyphens in bisyllabic (kah-vi ‘cof-fee’) and multisyllabic word...

The aim of this study was to investigate how irrelevant speech, temperature and ventilation rate together affect cognitive performance and environmental satisfaction in open-plan offices. In Condition A, neutral temperature (23.5 °C), low intelligibility of speech (high absorption and low masking sound level) and high fresh air supply rate (30 l/s...

The eye movements of Finnish first and second graders were monitored as they read sentences where polysyllabic words were either hyphenated at syllable boundaries, alternatingly coloured (every second syllable black, every second red) or had no explicit syllable boundary cues (e.g., ta-lo vs. talo vs. talo = “house”). The results showed that hyphen...

This paper provides a summary of the main issues that arose in the final "Discussion" session at the Volkswagen Workshop on Developmental Eye-tracking Research in Reading held in Hannover, Germany, October 2013. The Workshop focused on eye movement research investigating reading development, that is, change in reading performance with age. Developm...

Extending our understanding of the interplay between visual and cognitive processes during reading is essential to understand how reading develops and changes across the lifespan. Monitoring readers' eye movements provides a fine-grained online protocol of the reading process as it evolves over time, but until recently eye movements have rarely bee...

In this study we investigated the intricate interplay between central linguistic processing and peripheral motor processes during typewriting. Participants had to typewrite two-constituent (noun-noun) Finnish compounds in response to picture presentation while their typing behavior was registered. As dependent measures we used writing onset time to...

The aim of the study was to determine the effect of a temperature of 29 °C on performance in tasks involving different cognitive demands and to assess the effect on perceived performance, subjective workload, thermal comfort, perceived working conditions, cognitive fatigue and somatic symptoms in a laboratory with realistic office environment. A co...

Studies using backward masked emotional stimuli suggest that affective processing may occur outside visual awareness and imply primacy of affective over semantic processing, yet these experiments have not strictly controlled for the participants' awareness of the stimuli. Here we directly compared the primacy of affective versus semantic categoriza...

Unattended background speech is a known source of cognitive and subjective distraction in open-plan offices. This study investigated whether the deleterious effects of background speech can be affected by room acoustic design that decreases speech intelligibility, as measured by the Speech Transmission Index (STI). The experiment was conducted in a...

Our everyday visual environment is cluttered with advertisements. We come across them in newspapers, magazines, television, and Internet. They can be static, as in print advertisements, or dynamic, as is often the case with TV and Internet ads. The advertising messages are transmitted into the cognitive and affective systems via visual processes. R...