Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

During reading, readers intentionally do not fixate a wordwhen highly confident in its identity. In a rational model ofreading, word skipping decisions should be complex functionsof the particular word, linguistic context, and visual informa-tion available. In contrast, simple heuristic of reading onlypredicts additive effects of word and context features. Here wetest these predictions by implementing a rational model withBayesian inference, and predicting human skipping with theentropy of this model’s posterior distribution. Results showeda significant effect of the entropy in predicting skipping abovea strong baseline model including word and context features.This pattern held for entropy measures from rational modelswith a frequency prior but not from ones with a 5-gram prior.These results suggest complex interactions between visual in-put and linguistic knowledge as predicted by the rational modelof reading, and a dominant role of frequency in making skip-ping decisions.