The impact of hyperlinks, skim reading and perceived importance when reading on the Web.

It has previously been shown that readers spend a great deal of time skim reading on the Web and that this type of reading can affect comprehension of text. Across two experiments, we examine how hyperlinks influence perceived importance of sentences and how perceived importance in turn affects reading behaviour. In Experiment 1, participants rated the importance of sentences across passages of Wikipedia text. In Experiment 2, a different set of participants read these passages while their eye movements were tracked, with the task being either reading for comprehension or skim reading. Reading times of sentences were analysed in relation to the type of task and the importance ratings from Experiment 1. Results from Experiment 1 show readers rated sentences without hyperlinks as being of less importance than sentences that did feature hyperlinks, and this effect is larger when sentences are lower on the page. It was also found that short sentences with more links were rated as more important, but only when they were presented at the top of the page. Long sentences with more links were rated as more important regardless of their position on the page. In Experiment 2, higher importance scores resulted in longer sentence reading times, measured as fixation durations. When skim reading, however, importance ratings had a lesser impact on online reading behaviour than when reading for comprehension. We suggest readers are less able to establish the importance of a sentence when skim reading, even though importance could have been assessed by information that would be fairly easy to extract (i.e. presence of hyperlinks, length of sentences, and position on the screen).

The impact of skim reading and navigation when reading hyperlinks on the web.

It has been shown that readers spend a great deal of time skim reading on the Web and that this type of reading can affect lexical processing of words. Across two experiments, we utilised eye tracking methodology to explore how hyperlinks and navigating webpages affect reading behaviour. In Experiment 1, participants read static Webpages either for comprehension or whilst skim reading, while in Experiment 2, participants additionally read through a navigable Web environment. Embedded target words were either hyperlinks or not and were either high-frequency or low-frequency words. Results from Experiment 1 show that while readers lexically process both linked and unlinked words when reading for comprehension, readers only fully lexically process linked words when skim reading, as was evidenced by a frequency effect that was absent for the unlinked words. They did fully lexically process both linked and unlinked words when reading for comprehension. In Experiment 2, which allowed for navigating, readers only fully lexically processed linked words compared to unlinked words, regardless of whether they were skim reading or reading for comprehension. We suggest that readers engage in an efficient reading strategy where they attempt to minimise comprehension loss while maintaining a high reading speed. Readers use hyperlinks as markers to suggest important information and use them to navigate through the text in an efficient and effective way. The task of reading on the Web causes readers to lexically process words in a markedly different way from typical reading experiments.

The influence of number of syllables on word skipping during reading revisited.

Fitzsimmons and Drieghe (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18, 736-741, 2011) showed that a monosyllabic word was skipped more often than a disyllabic word during reading. This finding was interpreted as evidence that syllabic information was extracted from the parafovea early enough to influence word skipping. In the present, large-scale replication of this study, in which we additionally measured the reading, vocabulary, and spelling abilities of the participants, the effect of number of syllables on word skipping was not significant. Moreover, a Bayesian analysis indicated strong evidence for the absence of the effect. The individual differences analyses replicate previous observations showing that spelling ability uniquely predicts word skipping (but not fixation times) because better spellers skip more often. The results indicate that high-quality lexical representations allow the system to reach an advanced stage in the word-recognition process of the parafoveal word early enough to influence the decision of whether or not to skip the word, but this decision is not influenced by number of syllables.

The impact of hyperlinks on reading text.

There has been debate about whether blue hyperlinks on the Web cause disruption to reading. A series of eye tracking experiments were conducted to explore if coloured words in black text had any impact on reading behaviour outside and inside a Web environment. Experiment 1 and 2 explored the saliency of coloured words embedded in single sentences and the impact on reading behaviour. In Experiment 3, the effects of coloured words/hyperlinks in passages of text in a Web-like environment was explored. Experiment 1 and 2 showed that multiple coloured words in text had no negative impact on reading behaviour. However, if the sentence featured only a single coloured word, a reduction in skipping rates was observed. This suggests that the visual saliency associated with a single coloured word may signal to the reader that the word is important, whereas this signalling is reduced when multiple words are coloured. In Experiment 3, when reading passages of text containing hyperlinks in a Web environment, participants showed a tendency to re-read sentences that contained hyperlinked, uncommon words compared to hyperlinked, common words. Hyperlinks highlight important information and suggest additional content, which for more difficult concepts, invites rereading of the preceding text.

Parafoveal preview effects in reading unspaced text.

In English reading, eye guidance relies heavily on the spaces between words for demarcating word boundaries. In an eye tracking experiment, we examined the impact of removing spaces on parafoveal processing. Using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975), a high or low frequency preboundary word was followed by a postboundary preview presented either normally (i.e., identical to the postboundary word), or with letters replaced creating an orthographically illegal preview. The spaces between words were either retained or removed. Results replicate previous findings of increased reading times during unspaced reading (Rayner, Fischer, & Pollatsek, 1998) and indicate rather limited evidence for more distributed processing: Observations of processing of the previous word (spill-over effects) or processing of the next word (parafoveal-on-foveal effects) influencing fixation durations on the currently fixated word were limited. Spill-over effects were only observed in the unspaced layout when the postboundary preview was correct, presumably because the orthographically illegal, incorrect preview was visually salient enough to allow for relatively easy word segmentation and therefore more focused processing of the preboundary word. As such, results points toward a system that prefers narrowly focused processing of a single word, at least when means for easy word segmentation are available. (PsycINFO Database Record

Categorical templates are more useful when features are consistent: Evidence from eye movements during search for societally important vehicles.

Unlike in laboratory visual search tasks-wherein participants are typically presented with a pictorial representation of the item they are asked to seek out-in real-world searches, the observer rarely has veridical knowledge of the visual features that define their target. During categorical search, observers look for any instance of a categorically defined target (e.g., helping a family member look for their mobile phone). In these circumstances, people may not have information about noncritical features (e.g., the phone's color), and must instead create a broad mental representation using the features that define (or are typical of) the category of objects they are seeking out (e.g., modern phones are typically rectangular and thin). In the current investigation (Experiment 1), using a categorical visual search task, we add to the body of evidence suggesting that categorical templates are effective enough to conduct efficient visual searches. When color information was available (Experiment 1a), attentional guidance, attention restriction, and object identification were enhanced when participants looked for categories with consistent features (e.g., ambulances) relative to categories with more variable features (e.g., sedans). When color information was removed (Experiment 1b), attention benefits disappeared, but object recognition was still better for feature-consistent target categories. In Experiment 2, we empirically validated the relative homogeneity of our societally important vehicle stimuli. Taken together, our results are in line with a category-consistent view of categorical target templates (Yu, Maxfield, & Zelinsky in, Psychological Science, 2016. doi: 10.1177/0956797616640237 ), and suggest that when features of a category are consistent and predictable, searchers can create mental representations that allow for the efficient guidance and restriction of attention as well as swift object identification.

Oculomotor and linguistic processing effects in reading dynamic horizontally scrolling text.

Two experiments are reported investigating oculomotor behavior and linguistic processing when reading dynamic horizontally scrolling text (compared to reading normal static text). Three factors known to modulate processing time in normal reading were investigated: Word length and word frequency were examined in Experiment 1, and target word predictability in Experiment 2. An analysis of global oculomotor behavior across the 2 experiments showed that participants made fewer and longer fixations when reading scrolling text, with shorter progressive and regressive saccades between these fixations. Comparisons of the linguistic manipulations showed evidence of a dissociation between word-level and sentence-level processing. Word-level processing (Experiment 1) was preserved for the dynamic scrolling text condition with no difference in length and frequency effects between scrolling and static text formats. However, sentence-level integration (Experiment 2) was reduced for scrolling compared to static text in that we obtained no early facilitation effect for predictable words under scrolling text conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record

Using multidimensional scaling to quantify similarity in visual search and beyond.

Visual search is one of the most widely studied topics in vision science, both as an independent topic of interest, and as a tool for studying attention and visual cognition. A wide literature exists that seeks to understand how people find things under varying conditions of difficulty and complexity, and in situations ranging from the mundane (e.g., looking for one's keys) to those with significant societal importance (e.g., baggage or medical screening). A primary determinant of the ease and probability of success during search are the similarity relationships that exist in the search environment, such as the similarity between the background and the target, or the likeness of the non-targets to one another. A sense of similarity is often intuitive, but it is seldom quantified directly. This presents a problem in that similarity relationships are imprecisely specified, limiting the capacity of the researcher to examine adequately their influence. In this article, we present a novel approach to overcoming this problem that combines multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) analyses with behavioral and eye-tracking measurements. We propose a method whereby MDS can be repurposed to successfully quantify the similarity of experimental stimuli, thereby opening up theoretical questions in visual search and attention that cannot currently be addressed. These quantifications, in conjunction with behavioral and oculomotor measures, allow for critical observations about how similarity affects performance, information selection, and information processing. We provide a demonstration and tutorial of the approach, identify documented examples of its use, discuss how complementary computer vision methods could also be adopted, and close with a discussion of potential avenues for future application of this technique.

How fast can predictability influence word skipping during reading?

Participants' eye movements were tracked when reading sentences in which target word predictability was manipulated to being unpredictable from the preceding context, predictable from the sentence preceding the one in which the target word was embedded, or predictable from the adjective directly preceding the target word. Results show that there was no difference in skipping rates between the 2 predictability conditions, which were skipped more often than the neutral condition. This suggests that predictability can impact the decision of whether to skip a word to a similar degree irrespective of whether the predictability originated from the prior word or the entire preceding sentence context. This finding can only be explained by models of eye-movement control during reading that assume that word n is processed up to a high level before the decision to skip word n + 1 is made.

The influence of number of syllables on word skipping during reading.

In an eye-tracking experiment, participants read sentences containing a monosyllabic (e.g., grain) or a disyllabic (e.g., cargo) five-letter word. Monosyllabic target words were skipped more often than disyllabic target words, indicating that syllabic structure was extracted from the parafovea early enough to influence the decision of saccade target selection. Fixation times on the target word when it was fixated did not show an influence of number of syllables, demonstrating that number of syllables differentially impacts skipping rates and fixation durations during reading. [corrected]