Understanding The Concept Of Eye Fixation
Reduce eye fixation stops to improve your reading pace
These days, many people apply accelerated reading strategies to gain a competitive edge in the market. Although there are several ways to boost your reading pace, eye fixation remains an important concept to look at.
Eye fixation is one of the foremost components of effective reading. In simple terms, eye fixation refers to the point where your eyes take a rest during the reading process. People who tend to make fewer eye fixations during reading usually have a higher reading pace than people who make more frequent fixations.
This is because they can absorb more words with each fixation stop. Moreover, the number of words you can read with a single eye fixation directly links your vision span and vocabulary. In this tutorial, we explore the basics of this concept and share tips to reduce eye fixations to accelerate your reading.
Eye Fixation – Overview
Whenever we look at pictures, words, people, buildings, or the daily things surrounding us, our eyes have to stop for a split of a second to focus on the object. The duration varies and can last from 50 to 600 ms, depending on how much information needs to be processed. However, it is not important how far you are away from an object or its size.
When reading our eyes also stop for that split second, focus and move on to the next word or phrase. It is not so much of a behavioral habit how often those stops occur but rather your eyes’ ability to process enough information to understand a context or form a decision. The good thing is, we can train our eyes to take more data with fewer eye fixation stops.
Regression – Speaking of habit, eye fixation should not be mixed up with regression, which is skipping back in the text to re-read a sentence. This indeed is a habit though complex or unstructured material will often force us to do so. Hence, your eyes need to stop and focus, but you can learn to expand your vision span, but you can also learn to skip back, refocus again and thus lose more time.
Vision Span and Eye Fixations
Vision span or peripheral vision is the extent to which the human eye has an adequate vision to read text. As I have mentioned before, vision span and eye fixation are directly linked to each other. A person who has a broad vision span will be able to read faster as he/she will be capable to process more words in one eye fixation stop.
Quick test – You can test how it works. Hold a hand in front of you; set a focal point behind the hand. Move your hand to the right or left. While you cannot see all the details, you can certainly detect movement, shapes, colors, etc.
Chunking – To read faster it would, therefore, make sense to train your peripheral vision. One of the most effective ways is by learning to read chunks of words. This strategy works by focusing on phrases and even whole sentences rather than single words. As a reader, you will use 1-2 eye fixation stops per sentence/line and try to grasp the whole idea in one go. You will take advantage of peripheral vision to understand the words to the left and right with each eye fixation stop.
Tip: You can also learn this method by using speed reading software. Premium tutors usually provide drills and exercises to help expand your eye vision span.
Eye Fixation and Vocabulary
Your vocabulary has a direct impact on your reading pace. Moreover, eye fixation and vocabulary are also associated with each other. Readers who have a vast vocabulary usually develop a faster pace as they can absorb more words with one fixation.
On the contrary, readers who have a limited vocabulary will not be at ease while reading words that are new to them. As a result, they will spend more time understanding those words and likely make more eye fixations. Thus, it is important to improve your vocabulary. The following tips are a brief excerpt of how to expand it.
Keep a dictionary – dictionaries are very helpful when it comes to expanding vocabulary. If possible, keep a small pocket dictionary with you all the time and lookup for new words that you might hear anywhere. By doing so, you will retain the word in your memory for a longer period of time.
Word of the day calendar – it might sound funny to most of you, but these calendars work brilliantly. The calendar will add a new word to your vocabulary daily, and it will be easier for you to retain it. Just imagine, you will learn 30 new words in a month, and by the end of 1 year, your vocabulary will expand by 365 words.
Games – Expand your vocab by playing games such as scrabble and word jumble.
Consider software – There are many tools available online to really boost your pool of words. In any language! This is a review of the best vocabulary apps. You may also want to try Memrise for language skills.
Topic Familiarity and Eye Fixations
Your familiarity with a certain topic will also have an impact on your reading pace. If the text you are reading is regarding a topic of your interest, you will be able to read much faster than normal. Moreover, you will be able to absorb more words with each eye fixation stop.
On the other hand, recent studies have also revealed that people who have a high IQ and general knowledge usually read faster than people who have a lower IQ. Woah, it sounds rather frustrating. However, I want to mention this because of its bottom line: your reading pace will be determined by your vocabulary, vision span, and knowledge. So, keep educating yourself to get more out of books or material quicker.
Eye Fixation – Summary, Conclusion
Our eyes stop moving to focus, and the number of eye fixation stops we have to do while reading determines our pace. Reducing those stops is a way to accelerate your reading. One way is to train your peripheral eye vision or reading groups of words rather than single words.
To visualize this, imagine a text with 10-15 words per line. If you process this text word by word, you will use 10-15 eye fixation stops per line. Remember the time range used for each stop which is 50 to 600ms. Average readers fixate around 3-4 times per second or words per second. So one line would take you about 3-5 seconds.
Benefits – While this sounds good at first glance, imagine the potential to boost your reading by reducing stops on a larger scale. If you take only 3-5 stops, you could read a line within 1-2 seconds. It is a simple calculation. However, it will certainly take training and some effort, but I want to encourage you to get started today.
Tips to Reduce Eye Fixations
- Practice expanding your eye vision span.
- Learn reading chunks of words.
- Teach yourself advanced pacing methods with 1-2 stops per line.
- Improve your vocabulary to reduce eye fixations.
- Reduce and avoid regression to avoid refocusing.
- Use software or tools to train your eyes.
If you have tips or questions about eye fixation, please leave a comment below.