Using combined MEG and eye-tracking, we report new evidence suggesting that when eye movements are phase-locked to alpha oscillations in neural activity, the brain can better process and represent the visual objects that the eyes land on, supporting their encoding in memory.

These results suggest that during visual reading, word recognition and integration begin parafoveally, underpinned by the left occipito-temporal system.

AND this system appears to be the first port of call where word processing may rapidly exert downstream influences on eye movement behaviours.

What about word skipping? Here, we examined parafoveal processing of words that were skipped vs. fixated.

This revealed widespread parafoveal effects of frequency and surprisal before skipping, with significantly larger effects preceding skipped words in the left fusiform and middle temporal gyri

We identified putative generators of these influences in left occipito-temporal and ventral temporal areas.

These effects began in posterior areas during parafoveal word processing and shifted anteriorly when the word was fixated.

Matching past work, 2 properties significantly influenced fixation durations: a given word's frequency and it's surprisal in the current context.

Next, we asked where and when these properties influenced neural activity, time-locked to fixation onsets

To try to answer this, we recorded brain activity and eye movements with simultaneous MEG and eye-tracking, while participants naturally read short stories.

This allowed us to analyze neural activity time-locked to more than 22k gaze fixations

As a visual reader moves their eyes across this sentence, they will linger on certain words longer than others, and skip some entirely.

How does the brain make these decisions, based on the incoming linguistic input, in tens or hundreds of milliseconds?