The Effects of Reading Speed on Visual Search Task

Speed reading training enhances one’s reading speed. Typically, those who train using the Park-Sasaki training method can read all the characters sequentially with the reading speed of over 10,000 characters per minute (about over 4,000 words per minute in English sentences). It means that they take in a huge amount of information during speed reading. Our study investigated the training effect on visual perception and attention using a visual search task and revealed that speed reading changes the performance of a visual search task. In the conjunction task, compared with novices, the slope of response times for experts as a function of set size was shallow, which suggests that experts watch a wider area than do novices, or that experts conduct a parallel search, at least in part. The measurements of eye movements during the experiments support this explanation; experts could respond with fewer episodes of fixation than could novices. As we used a simple non-letter-based feature as the stimulus, the results suggest that training improves general ability to process visual stimuli, regardless of language. We think that speed reading training improves attention which plays an important role in the conjunction task.