The impact of hyperlinks, skim reading and perceived importance when reading on the Web

Abstract

It has previously been shown that readers spend a great deal of time skim reading on the Web and that this type of reading can affect comprehension of text. Across two experiments, we examine how hyperlinks influence perceived importance of sentences and how perceived importance in turn affects reading behaviour. In Experiment 1, participants rated the importance of sentences across passages of Wikipedia text. In Experiment 2, a different set of participants read these passages while their eye movements were tracked, with the task being either reading for comprehension or skim reading. Reading times of sentences were analysed in relation to the type of task and the importance ratings from Experiment 1. Results from Experiment 1 show readers rated sentences without hyperlinks as being of less importance than sentences that did feature hyperlinks, and this effect is larger when sentences are lower on the page. It was also found that short sentences with more links were rated as more important, but only when they were presented at the top of the page. Long sentences with more links were rated as more important regardless of their position on the page. In Experiment 2, higher importance scores resulted in longer sentence reading times, measured as fixation durations. When skim reading, however, importance ratings had a lesser impact on online reading behaviour than when reading for comprehension. We suggest readers are less able to establish the importance of a sentence when skim reading, even though importance could have been assessed by information that would be fairly easy to extract (i.e. presence of hyperlinks, length of sentences, and position on the screen).

Unveiling deception: Characterizing false amber necklace messages on Facebook

“…Links provide a reliable gateway for individuals to obtain additional information on a topic of interest. The heightened public appeal of these posts may stem from a desire to gain knowledge and make informed decisions about the products 21 …”

“…The heightened public appeal of these posts may stem from a desire to gain knowledge and make informed decisions about the products. 21 Indeed, the prevalence of posts made on social media by commercial profiles with financial, social, and psychological motivations can be attributed to companies' promotional and communication efforts to establish emotional connections with their consumers, such as prizes, discounts, and positive messaging. [22][23][24] This approach aims to increase their penetration among social media users.…”

Seven Hypertexts

“…Links have been hailed as the new punctuation [124], and shown to influence reading even when not used for navigation [104], but they are not the only interaction associated with hypertext; over the years many interfaces have been proposed for searching and browsing hypertext structures. Maps are a common approach and were present in the earliest systems [35,95], they use a visual representation to show the architecture of the hypertext and its connections, and can be based on spaces, sequences of scenes, network visualisations, and other approaches [141].…”