Skim reading by satisficing

Abstract

Readers on the Web often skim through text to cope with the volume of available information. In a previous study, Duggan and Payne [11] tracked readers' eye movements as they skimmed through expository text under time pressure. This article presents novel analyses of these eye-movement data. Results indicated that readers were able to explicitly direct attention to the most important information in the text and that this improved performance on a subsequent test of memory for the meaning of text. We suggest readers achieve this by satisficing reading through text until the rate of information gain drops below threshold and then skipping to the next section of text. Further analyses of gaze patterns for paragraphs and pages supported this explanation. Combining satisficing with some form of scanning or sampling behaviour could explain patterns of reading found on the Web. A greater understanding of the way that text is read on the Web would assist many producers of online content.