An Exploration of Eye Movements when Reading Texts with Atypical Spatial Layouts

In two experiments we explored eye movements that people make when looking at texts with an atypical spatial layout. In the first experiment, participants repeatedly viewed the same piece of text, containing sections in different languages and printed using different fonts and reading directions, while they answered different questions about what they saw. In agreement with earlier studies showing significant differences in gaze patterns across different tasks, we found that reading was strongly influenced by the questions that participants tried to answer. In the second experiment, we examined gaze patterns for different types of poems while participants performed a single task: To rate their appreciation of the poem. Poems were either in the typical form, with short lines all aligned to the left, or they were in an atypical form (“graphical poem”), with the text dispersed across the page, in different fonts, reading directions, and size. Half of the poems were from an artist known for his graphical poems, the other half were from different authors who posted their poems on a webpage. All these poems were presented in a typical and an atypical form. Participants rated the poems from the web more highly, but took less time to inspect them. Whether the poem was in a typical or an atypical layout did not influence the ratings, even though longer inspection times were found for the atypical forms. Eye movement parameters, such as fixation duration and saccade amplitude, were relatively unaffected by the layout of the poems, although some additional larger amplitude saccades could be observed for the atypical forms