Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Books for beginning readers typically intermix text and pictures in close proximity. The proximity of difficult-to-decode text to pictures may induce competition between these sources of information. As a result, children may frequently shiftgaze between text and pictures, which may degrade memory representations of the text and reduce comprehension. A mobileeye tracker was used to measure children’s attention allocation while reading commercially available books for beginningreaders. Preliminary evidence suggests that pictures capture young children’s (N=12, Mage=7.14 years) attention while theyare engaged in guided reading. Even when the text was short (on average 6.94 words per page), children frequently shifted theirattention between text and pictures. Per page, children made on average 2.80 alterations from text to pictures (Range: 0.93 to6.57 alterations). These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the close proximity of text and pictures may result incompetition between these sources of information