Rational eye movements in reading combining uncertainty about previous words with contextual probability

While there exist a range of sophisticated models of eye movements in reading, it remains an open question to what extent human eye movement behavior during reading is adaptive given the demands of the task. In this paper, we help to answer this question by presenting a model of reading that corrects two problems with a rational model of the task, Mr. Chips (Legge, Klitz, & Tjan, 1997). We show that the resulting model is closer to human performance across two measures, supporting the idea that many components of eye movement behavior in reading can be well understood as a rational response to the demands of the task.