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.
