# Eye-Movement Suppression in the Visual World Paradigm

## TL;DR

This study shows that people can suppress eye movements to images referenced by language, suggesting eye movements in visual tasks are influenced by task demands as much as language.

## Contribution

The first study to test how task constraints modulate eye movement behavior in the visual world paradigm.

## Key findings

- Participants reduced fixations to referred images from 58% to 18% when instructed to avoid looking.
- Comprehension scores remained high despite suppressed eye movements.
- Eye movements can be partially decoupled from language processing depending on task demands.

## Abstract

Eye movements in the visual world paradigm are known to depend not only on linguistic input but on such factors as task, pragmatic context, affordances, etc. However, the degree to which eye movements may depend on task rather than on linguistic input is unclear. The present study for the first time tests how task constraints modulate eye movement behavior in the visual world paradigm by probing whether participants could refrain from looking at the referred image. Across two experiments with and without comprehension questions (total N = 159), we found that when participants were instructed to avoid looking at the referred images, the probability of fixating these reduced from 58% to 18% while comprehension scores remained high. Although language-mediated eye movements could not be suppressed fully, the degree of possible decoupling of eye movements from language processing suggests that participants can withdraw at least some looks from the referred images when needed. If they do so to different degrees in different experimental conditions, comparisons between conditions might be compromised. We discuss some cases where participants could adopt different viewing behaviors depending on the experimental condition, and provide some tentative ways to test for such differences.