Eye-Hand/Voice Span and Perceptual Span

Eye-Hand/Voice Span: measures how far ahead the eyes are from the hand/voice

Skilled readers Less skilled readers

4 notes 2 notes (Furneaux and Land)
about 2 beats under one beat (Truit at al.)
2 beats 0.5 beat (Rayner and Pollatsek)
1-2 notes 1-2 notes (Weaver) (more complex music)
4 beats (singers- Goolsby, 1994)
0 up to 2 notes (Jacobsen, 1941)


(I think it is more effective to measure EHS in beats because of the “chunking” abilities of the musicians-one beat can include several notes).

All researchers agree that the EHS of the musicians is small.
Truitt at al conclude that musicians do not need to see more then one measure ahead of the hands/voice in order to read well and readers rarely extract information beyond a measure (4 beats). However small, that does not mean that the visual process of the music is not ahead of the fixation (Weaver, 1943; Goolsby, 1994; Kinsler and Carpenter, 1995).
Rayner and Pollatsek state: “This discrepancy between the data and conventional wisdom might be due to the fact that musicians, like all human perceivers, are seduced by the illusion that information can be extracted from a wider region of vision than is actually possible”. (1997)


Perceptual Span: it measures the size of the visual field and our awareness of it. The perceptual span is the region around the fixation in which we obtain some information.

Both Truit at al and Rayner and Pollatsek (1997) found that, contrary to the musicians believes, the perceptual span is also small (the visual processing is also close to the hands). Its size is more or less one measure. That is > 2 < 4 notes ahead of the hands. Visual processing for musicians is also comparable to reading aloud (1.1 words for adults and less then half a word for a 1st grader-Garzia) and typing (about 6 characters-Rayner and Pollatsek).
(When researchers measure the EHS, they are taking the average and when they measure the perceptual span, they take the maximum).


Rayner and Pollatsek concluded that the less skilled reader when combining the EHS and the PS, extract useful information up to about 3 or 4 beats ahead of the hands. For skilled readers, the combination leads to only up to 5 beats ahead of the hands.

In the article Eye Movements in Reading: Facts and Fallacies by Stanford E. Taylor, he estates that “No studies to date have shown that training to widen span has resulted in the ability to see in phrases during continuous reading. Feinberg’s study (1949) suggested that the physiological limitations of the eye will probably present readers from ever reaching this goal “… when retinal impressions are superimposed on preceding ones at the rate of 3 to 5 per second in a dynamic act where the kinesthesia of the ocular activity and the sequence of impressions further reduce the already rather tenuous peripheral impressions. In addition, there is the demand for continually organizing the multiple ideas presented in reading material. Consequently, the span of recognition in reading is distinctly smaller than that occurring and measured in static seeing situations (Taylor, 1957) and maybe thought of as “salvageable” span”.