Visual foraging of highlighted text: an eye-tracking study

  • Authors:
  • Ed H. Chi;Michelle Gumbrecht;Lichan Hong

  • Affiliations:
  • Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA;Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA;Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA

  • Venue:
  • HCI'07 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Human-computer interaction: intelligent multimodal interaction environments
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

The wide availability of digital reading material online is causing a major shift in everyday reading activities. Readers are skimming instead of reading in depth [Nielson 1997]. Highlights are increasingly used in digital interfaces to direct attention toward relevant passages within texts. In this paper, we study the eye-gaze behavior of subjects using both keyword highlighting and ScentHighlights [Chi et al. 2005]. In this first eye-tracking study of highlighting interfaces, we show that there is direct evidence of the von Restorff isolation effect [VonRestorff 1933] in the eye-tracking data, in that subjects focused on highlighted areas when highlighting cues are present. The results point to future design possibilities in highlighting interfaces.