MODE OF TEXT PRESENTATION AND ITS INFLUENCE ON READING EFFICIENCY: SCROLLING VERSUS PAGINATION

In the last decades, the Internet has developed into a proliferating and flourishing source of information. This phenomenon requires complex pieces of writing to be presented in a way that expedites their efficient processing. This paper presents an experiment studying how text presentation affects reading efficiency and text recall. We compared different types of text presentations - scrolling and text pagination with and without callouts. A word recognition task was used to assess the recognition of a presented text. Discrepancies in reading efficiency were apparent in the results obtained from the eye tracking data; namely, we noted that scrolling is more demanding than reading paginated text in terms of the processing time. Our findings provide support for claims of more efficient processing of paginated texts. Such text presentation appears to have a strong influence on cognition that should be taken into account by designers whenever visualizing complex texts online.