Thanks! Interesting connection!
Because reading was naturalistic, I doubt aphantasics could deliberately (out of social pressure) copy eye fixations as influenced by imagery content in controls.
However, in non-naturalistic settings, social pressure might be a factor.

This dissociation between reading behaviour and subjective experiences may suggest that mental imagery is nonconscious rather than nonexistent in aphantasia. 💡
Read the full paper in Acta Psychologica doi.org/10.1016/j.ac... (5/5)

The only notable difference we found was in the subjective reading experience.
Participants with aphantasia reported lower immersion in the stories.
The longer fixation was associated with greater experienced imagery in controls, but not in aphantasics. (4/5)

Surprisingly, gaze fixation patterns were highly similar across groups!
Both aphantasic and control readers showed longer fixations on descriptively rich sensory content. (3/5)

For example, do aphantasics fixate less on imagery-inducing words or phrases because they cannot visualize them?
To test this, we recorded eye movements while participants with and without aphantasia read imagery-rich stories. 👀📖 (2/5)

We added a new paragraph in our discussion section, addressing this, which you can review, if you are interested.

Despite this, our results remained similar. So, this gives additional support for the validity of our interpretation of the results. But we acknowledge that we may not be able to fully rule out your concern.

Hi,
Thank you for this comment! This is a valid concern.
In the new version of our preprint, we included a supplementary analysis that accounted for possible linguist and reading factors, such lexical difficulty, sentence structure (verb, noun, etc.), and some text (layout) structure.