The influence of text visualization on the screen on eye movements and information processing

Abstract

Since the last decade Internet has become a rapidly growing source of professional and scientific information. This trend necessitates defining new standards for presenting sophisticated texts to facilitate their efficient processing. The experiment involving 40 participants presented in this paper investigates the influence of text visualization on text recall. We contrasted text scrolling versus dividing paragraphs into separate screens and additionally provided drop-in quotes for both conditions. The dependent variables were derived from a text recall test conducted at the end of the experiment combined with eye tracking data regarding average fixation and dwell time. Sensory processing was tested using word recognition tasks, whereas the semantic level was examined using synonyms and multiple-choice questions. Based on the results, we argue that text visualization techniques are likely to facilitate information processing on the sensory and semantic level. Eye tracking data shows differences in reading efficiency; it was observed that scrolling required more processing time comparing to reading text divided into screens, while the results from a recall test remained almost identical. More specifically, participants from the latter group memorized more words that had never appeared in the original text. In addition, we observed significant differences in eye movements for middle paragraphs.