Abstract
This study used eye-tracking to examine whether extraneous illustration details—a common design in beginning reader storybooks—promote attentional competition and hinder learning. The study used a within-subject design with first- and second-grade children. Children (n = 60) read a story in a commercially available Standard condition and in a Streamlined condition, in which extraneous illustrations were removed while an eye-tracker recorded children’s gaze shifts away from the text, fixations to extraneous illustrations, and fixations to relevant illustrations. Extraneous illustrations promoted attentional competition and hindered reading comprehension: children made more gaze shifts away from text in the Standard compared to the Streamlined condition, and reading comprehension was significantly higher in the Streamlined condition compared to the Standard condition. Importantly, fixations toward extraneous details accounted for the unique variance in reading comprehension controlling for reading proficiency and attending to relevant illustrations. Furthermore, a follow-up control experiment (n = 60) revealed that these effects did not solely stem from enhanced text saliency in the Streamlined condition and reproduced the finding of a negative relationship between fixations to extraneous details and reading comprehension. This study provides evidence that the design of reading materials can be optimized to promote literacy development in young children.
Highlights
Learning to read is a crucially important skill because reading provides a gateway for learning within and outside of school
The reported results provide evidence that excluding extraneous illustrations from reading materials for beginning readers can enhance children’s attention to the text and improve reading comprehension. These findings are strengthened further by the results of the follow-up control experiment, which provided evidence that the benefits of removing extraneous illustrations for attention and reading comprehension were unlikely to be driven by greater text discriminability
Most children exhibited fewer gaze shifts away from the text and obtained higher comprehension scores when reading in the Streamlined condition compared to the commercially available Standard condition
Summary
Learning to read is a crucially important skill because reading provides a gateway for learning within and outside of school. Looking away from the text at illustrations may result in the encoding of irrelevant details into a working memory which may disrupt text coherence It may be difficult for beginning readers to build a strong understanding of the story if they attend to extraneous illustrations while reading. Attention regulation skills are still developing during the time when children begin formal reading instruction[10,11,12]; it is important to evaluate the possibility that unnecessary embellishments to educational materials intended to engage children might do so at the cost of disrupting attention and learning[13,14,15,16]. Entertaining visuals in children’s educational materials have enormous potential to engage children—but these additional visuals might be counterproductive if they are unrelated to the story text as they may distract children from the primary task (i.e., decoding the words and making meaning from the text)
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