Defamiliarization, Dreaming, and Reading 1 Defamiliarization in Dreaming and Reading: Eye Movements and Attentional Disengagement

The fictional world imaginatively constituted during literary reading is sometimes compared with the imaginal world created during dreaming. At the core of both reading and dreaming may be the type of attentional adjustment that occurs when departures from expected events emerge in experience. During dreaming, markers of this attentional adjustment – and of the related transformations of dream content – are the eye movements characteristic of REM sleep. Recent research suggests that eye movements induced during wakefulness similarly prompt dreamlike transformations of imaginal activity. Therefore, we hypothesized that, during reading, induced eye movements would facilitate defamiliarization in response to the deviations from literal meanings found in metaphoric expressions. To test this hypothesis, twenty-five undergraduates completed 20 seconds of eye movements or 20 seconds of visual fixation before each of two tasks: (a) a covert visual attention task (Posner & Cohen, 1984), in which a cue indicated the likely position of a subsequent target, and (b) a sentence rating task, in which sentences with either metaphoric or non-metaphoric endings were rated for strikingness. Repeated measures ANOVAs indicated that the eye movement manipulation facilitated attentional adjustments to targets presented in invalidly cued locations and increased the extent to which metaphoric sentence endings were found striking. These results suggest that induced eye movements facilitate attentional reorientation toward the novel meanings found in metaphoric expressions, providing evidence that dreaming and reading involve a similarly " defamiliarizing " attentional adjustment.