Tanaka, T. 1, 2 , Tanida, Y. 1 , Sugimoto, M. 1 , Tsunemi, K. 1 , Shinoda, A. 3 , Yasuda, H. 3 , Kuzuguchi, A. 3 & Saito, S. 1
1 Department of Cognitive Psychology in Education, Kyoto University. Kyoto, Japan.
2 Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Tokyo, Japan.
3 Graduate School of Education, Kyoto University. Kyoto, Japan.
Reading text requires the reconstruction of information that was degraded during sentence processing. This process of reconstruction involves relocating previously presented information. To explore the nature of this relocation process during reading and its relationship with verbal and spatial working memory (WM) capacity, we employed a "who-done-it" task with an eye-tracking technique. In our task, text information was available on a PC screen while participants answered questions such as "Who done it?" after reading a text. We recorded participants' eye movements while they performed this task and measured the distance between the fixation point immediately after reading each question and the location of the target word in the text. The mean distance was negatively correlated with both verbal and spatial WM scores, and a partial correlation analysis indicated that the shared variance of verbal and spatial WM scores accounted for individual differences in the distances between fixation points. These results suggest that domain-general WM capacity underpins the relocation processes during text reading.