School of Psychology, University of Southampton, United Kingdom.
School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2019 Feb 6;14(2):e0210900. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0210900. eCollection 2019.
There has been debate about whether blue hyperlinks on the Web cause disruption to reading. A series of eye tracking experiments were conducted to explore if coloured words in black text had any impact on reading behaviour outside and inside a Web environment. Experiment 1 and 2 explored the saliency of coloured words embedded in single sentences and the impact on reading behaviour. In Experiment 3, the effects of coloured words/hyperlinks in passages of text in a Web-like environment was explored. Experiment 1 and 2 showed that multiple coloured words in text had no negative impact on reading behaviour. However, if the sentence featured only a single coloured word, a reduction in skipping rates was observed. This suggests that the visual saliency associated with a single coloured word may signal to the reader that the word is important, whereas this signalling is reduced when multiple words are coloured. In Experiment 3, when reading passages of text containing hyperlinks in a Web environment, participants showed a tendency to re-read sentences that contained hyperlinked, uncommon words compared to hyperlinked, common words. Hyperlinks highlight important information and suggest additional content, which for more difficult concepts, invites rereading of the preceding text.
关于网页上的蓝色超链接是否会干扰阅读，一直存在争议。我们进行了一系列眼动追踪实验，以探究网页内外的黑色文本中的彩色单词是否会对阅读行为产生影响。实验 1 和实验 2 分别探究了嵌入单句中的彩色单词的显著性以及它们对阅读行为的影响。实验 3 则探究了网页式环境下的文本段落中彩色单词/超链接的影响。实验 1 和实验 2 表明，文本中出现多个彩色单词不会对阅读行为产生负面影响。但是，如果句子中只有一个彩色单词，那么会观察到跳过率的降低。这表明，单个彩色单词的视觉显著性可能会向读者发出信号，表明该单词很重要，而当多个单词被标记为彩色时，这种信号就会减弱。在实验 3 中，当参与者在网页环境中阅读包含超链接的文本段落时，他们更倾向于重读包含超链接的不常见单词的句子，而不是超链接的常见单词的句子。超链接突出了重要信息，并暗示了更多的内容，对于更难的概念，这会促使读者重读前面的文本。
