Reading in the city: mobile eye-tracking and evaluation of text in an everyday setting

Abstract

Reading is often regarded as a mundane aspect of everyday life. However, little is known about the natural reading experiences in daily activities. To fill this gap, this study presents two field studies (N = 39 and 26, respectively), where we describe how people explore visual environments and divide their attention toward text elements in highly ecological settings, i.e., urban street environments, using mobile eye-tracking glasses. Further, the attention toward the text elements (i.e., shop signs) as well as their memorability, measured via follow-up recognition test, were analysed in relation to their aesthetic quality, which is assumed to be key for attracting visual attention and memorability. Our results revealed that, within these urban streets, text elements were looked at most, and looking behaviour was strongly directed, especially toward shop signs, across both street contexts; however, aesthetic values were not correlated either with the most looked at signs or the viewing time for the signs. Aesthetic ratings did however have an effect on memorability, with signs rated higher being better recognised. The results will be discussed in terms aesthetic reading experiences and implications for future field studies.

Aesthetic Elements of Urban Environments and their relation to Wellbeing: A scoping review.

“…Indeed, specific urban components within the 'Structural/Infrastructure' category that relate to signage were only investigated once in the reviewed articles, such as information boards (Budner, 2016), posters (Johannes et al, 2021), signboards (Wang et al, 2010), and other wayfinding objects (Hunter & Askarinejad, 2015). Similar to art, signage, and other textual elements have been regarded as 'urban aesthetic' objects and should also be researched more within this context (Chana et al, 2023;see Kim &Mitschke et al, 2017 from the reviewed articles). Moreover, within this same category, other infrastructural elements, such as construction sites (Seresinhe et al, 2017), only appeared once.…”

“…Other objects aside from art can also be aesthetically relevant (see Leder et al, 2004;2011;Pelowski et al, 2017;Skov & Nadal, 2020), and the notion of aesthetics can be applied to objects from our everyday urban environments, i.e., those that are not traditionally categorised as art (Knoll et al, 2024;Specker, et al, 2024). In this regard, there appears to be a growing interest in empirical aesthetics towards studying the urban environment (Brielmann et al, 2022;Chana et al, 2023;Gartus & Leder, 2014;Gartus et al, 2015;Leder et al, 2010;Leder et al, 2016;Mikuni et al, 2024;Mitschke et al, 2017;Tinio & Leder, 2009).…”