Institute of Behavioral Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland.
J Exp Psychol Appl. 2011 Jun;17(2):174-90. doi: 10.1037/a0024042.
Human vision is sensitive to salient features such as motion. Therefore, animation and onset of advertisements on Websites may attract visual attention and disrupt reading. We conducted three eye tracking experiments with authentic Web pages to assess whether (a) ads are efficiently ignored, (b) ads attract overt visual attention and disrupt reading, or (c) ads are covertly attended with distraction showing up indirectly in the reading performance. The Web pages contained an ad above a central text and another ad to the right of the text. In Experiments 1, 2, and 3A the task was to read for comprehension. Experiment 1 examined whether the degree of animation affects attention toward the ads. The results showed that ads were overtly attended during reading and that the dwell times on ads were the longest when the ad above was static and the other ad was animated. In Experiments 2 and 3, the ads appeared abruptly after a random time interval. The results showed that attention (i.e., the time when the eyes first entered an ad) was related to the ad onset time. This happened especially for the ad to the right, indicating that ads appearing close to the text region capture overt attention. In Experiment 3B the participants browsed the Web pages according to their own interest. The study demonstrated that salient ads attract overt visual attention and disrupt reading, but during free browsing, ads were viewed more frequently and for longer time than during reading.
人类视觉对运动等显著特征很敏感。因此，网站上的动画和广告开始播放可能会吸引视觉注意并干扰阅读。我们通过三个真实网页的眼动追踪实验来评估以下几点：(a) 广告是否可以被有效地忽略；(b) 广告是否会吸引显性视觉注意并干扰阅读；或(c) 广告是否会被隐性注意，其干扰会间接体现在阅读表现上。网页上有一个位于文本上方的广告和另一个位于文本右侧的广告。在实验 1、2 和 3A 中，阅读任务为理解性阅读。实验 1 检验了动画程度是否会影响对广告的注意。结果表明，在阅读过程中广告会受到显性注意，并且当上方的广告是静态的而另一个广告是动画时，广告的停留时间最长。在实验 2 和 3 中，广告会在随机时间间隔后突然出现。结果表明，注意（即眼睛第一次进入广告的时间）与广告开始时间有关。这对于位于右侧的广告尤其明显，表明靠近文本区域的广告会吸引显性注意。在实验 3B 中，参与者根据自己的兴趣浏览网页。研究表明，显著的广告会吸引显性视觉注意并干扰阅读，但在自由浏览时，广告的被观看频率和时长都比阅读时更高。
