Inhibition of saccade return in reading.

We examined the characteristics of readers' eye movements as they read sentences or short passages of text and compared the durations of eye fixations preceding two types of saccades: (a) saccades to words that were fixated on the prior fixation (return saccades) and (b) saccades in which the eyes moved about the same distance but did not land on a word fixated on the prior fixation (non-return saccades). Consistent with research from much simpler attention or oculomotor tasks, we found what could be considered an inhibition of return effect: fixations preceding return saccades were longer than those preceding non-return saccades.