Abstract
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.
Highlights
One of the main differences between reading on and off the Web is that the materials that are being read on the Web contain hyperlinks embedded within the text
Visual saliency is a stimulus-driven signal that announces to us that a certain item or location is different to the rest of the visual field and is worthy of attention
When calculating the eye movement measures, data that were more than 2.5 standard deviations from the mean for a participant within a specific condition were removed (
Summary
One of the main differences between reading on and off the Web is that the materials that are being read on the Web contain hyperlinks embedded within the text. Two differences between reading hyperlinked words compared to plain words are explored in this study: Firstly, hyperlinks are typically coloured and salient compared to the rest of the text and secondly, a hyperlink links one piece of information to another, perhaps on a separate page of the same website, or a different website all together. This paper systematically explores these features in order to understand the impact of hyperlinks on reading text on the Web. Starting with saliency, hyperlinks are salient items that stand out from the rest of the text in some way. Visual saliency is a stimulus-driven signal that announces to us that a certain item or location is different to the rest of the visual field and is worthy of attention. A lone red item in a field of green items will stand out to us and be salient compared to the rest
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