Against speed reading

There are at least three different types of reader, with those people who make frequent backward glances to earlier subject headings and key sentences, demonstrating the better comprehension for what they’ve just read. The two other types of reader are slow and fast ‘linear readers’, who tend to read continuously from one line to the next, making few backward glances. The finding comes from an analysis of the eye movements of 44 undergraduate students by Jukka Hyönä and Anna-Mari Nurminen at the University of Turku in Finland, who say their finding has implications for the teaching of reading.

“This finding demonstrates the usefulness and functionality of the look-back and rereading fixations”, the researchers said. Jukka Hyönä told the Digest: “Our study clearly shows that the advocates of speed reading are wrong in saying that regressions are a sign of poor reading and a bad habit. We have shown that selective looking back is in fact a sign of strategic reading”.

Hyönä and Nurminen drew their conclusions after recording the students’ eye movements as they read a 12 page on-screen text about animals in danger of extinction. They classified 16 per cent of students as ‘topic structure processors’ who spent more time rereading earlier parts of the current sentence, as well as going back to earlier subject headings and the first sentences of paragraphs. Eighteen per cent of the students were classified as fast linear readers, and 66 per cent as slow linear readers. After reading the text, the students wrote down as many of the main points as they could think of, with the readers who performed more rereading tending to produce a more comprehensive summary of the text.

A later questionnaire showed that the students had good insight into the kind of reader they were, accurately estimating how fast they read compared to other people, and how often they looked back over earlier text.

Jukka Hyona told the Digest “The smart processing strategy that we found could easily be taught to children or adults. In fact, I understand some teachers are actually teaching something similar to our ‘topic structure processing strategy’”.
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Hyona, J. & Nurminen, A-M. (2006). Do adult readers know how they read? Evidence from eye movement patterns and verbal reports. British Journal of Psychology, 97, 31-50.

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Detecting psychological distress from where a patient sits

Patients suffering from depression or anxiety are more likely to choose to sit to their left when visiting the GP, an observation that has implications for the detection of psychological distress among patients. That’s according to a study by Dr. Peter Luck, at Christmas Maltings Surgery in Suffolk.

“The seating arrangement I now use in my surgery allows patients to choose their spatial orientation (left/right) with me during face-to-face consultations. I use this system to alert me, when patients choose to sit to their left, that there is a greater possibility that they may be suffering from psychological distress “, Dr. Luck told the Digest.

During Luck’s research, a GP’s consulting room was arranged for five months so that two chairs were positioned an equal distance to the left or right of the GP’s desk. The choice of chair made by 756 patients seeing their GP was recorded, and after their consultation each patient was tested for anxiety and depression using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale. Their handedness was determined according to the hand they wrote with.

Among the 674 right-handed patients, Dr. Luck found that those who scored positively for anxiety or depression (358 of them) were significantly more likely to sit in the left-hand chair facing the GP (59 per cent of them did) than those who weren’t anxious or depressed (27 per cent of them sat on the left). A similar effect was not found among the 82 left-handers, possibly because they were too few in number.

The right-handed patients who weren’t depressed or anxious tended to choose the right-hand chair, reflecting their attentional preference for the left side of space, consistent with past research. Somehow, psychological distress seems to affect this usual attentional bias, thus explaining the Dr. Luck’s pattern of results. The finding adds to past research showing that depressed mothers tend to cradle their baby on their right, the opposite of the usual bias among mothers to hold their baby on the left (see Digest issue 26, item 1).
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Luck, P. (2006). Does the presence of psychological distress in patients influence their choice of sitting position in face-to-face consultation with the GP? Laterality, 11, 90-100.

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