Sensory Systems | Cognitive Neuroscience
Reading faster by reducing visual crowding
Sarah Rosen*, Denis Pelli
*Corresponding author: Sarah Rosen
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, New York University, New York, NY, USA
F1000Posters 2012, 3: 450 (slide presentation) [English]
Slide Presentation [2.46 MB]
Presented at
Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting 2012,
11 - 16 May 2012, 34.12
There is great interest in designing fonts and electronic methods of display to increase reading speed, but so far, any improvements have been modest. Visual span is the number of letters that can be identified with a single fixation, letters beyond this are too crowded to recognize. If crowding can be reduced so that more letters can be identified with each glimpse, reading speed should increase proportionally.
We used an eye-tracker to isolate sections of text from the background text, in order to reduce visual crowding. Observers read 18% faster using our gaze-contingent paradigm [t(3) = 13.8837, p less than 0.001] than with unaltered text.
We will determine how much of the increase in reading speed is due to visual crowding, and how much is due to other factors, such as increased attention.
This method has a provisional patent filed.
National Eye Institute, EY04432
Please note that most posters on this site present work that is preliminary in nature and has not been peer reviewed.
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