Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We expand upon the case for believing that the initial precise splitting of the foveal projection to the visual cortex fundamentally conditions the whole process of visual word recognition. We explore the optimal behaviour of a split architecture that attempts to divide its processing load equally between its two halves. We successfully model three aspects of fixation behaviour in human readers: (a) the positioning of the optimal viewing position to the left of the midpoint of the word, (b) a displaced Gaussian curve of letter-report accuracy resembling an RVF advantage, (c) the tendency for shorter words not to be directly fixated.