Temporal evolution of the central fixation bias 15 Table 2: Output of LMM for Experiment 2 Fixed Effect Estimate SE t (Intercept) 2 . 167 0 . 094 22 . 965 ∗∗∗ 0 ms − 0 . 899 0 . 186 − 4 . 829 ∗∗∗ 125 ms − 0 . 010 0 . 177 − 0 . 054 250 ms 0 . 228 0 . 174 1 . 308 500 ms 0 . 255 0 . 177 1 . 439 saccade latency 0 . 468 0 . 110 4 . 258 ∗∗∗ saccade latency x 0 ms 1 . 126 0 . 291 3 . 870 ∗∗∗ saccade latency x 125 ms 0 . 327 0 . 229 1 . 430 saccade latency x 250 ms − 0 . 541 0 . 204 − 2 . 656 ∗∗ saccade latency x 500 ms − 0 . 235 0 . 208 − 1 . 132 Random effects variance: Subjects 0 . 1112 Random effects variance: Images 0 . 1333 Log-Likelihood − 3599 . 60 Deviance 7199 . 20 AIC 7225 . 20 BIC 7299 . 56 N 2253 $^{∗}$p < . 05 , $^{∗∗}$p < . 01 , $^{∗∗∗}$p < . 001 replicated our observations from Experiment 1 and demonstrated that a reduced CFB was not exclusively generated by the extreme starting positions used in Experiment 1. The results from Experiment 1 and 2 showed that a pre-trial fixation time of 125 ms was enough to reduce the central fixation bias on early fixations. The difference of the CFB between pre-trial fixation times larger than 125 ms was relatively small. To investigate the minimum pre-trial fixation time for a substantial CFB reduction, we conducted a third experiment with pre-trial fixation times ranging from 0 to 125 ms in six equidistant steps. We changed the between-subject design of pre-trial fixation time to a within- subject design to reduce the influence of individual participants (cf., Exp. 1). Hence, every participant was tested with all pre-trial fixation times. Since effects were maximal Experiment 3