{"pk":27764,"title":"Effects of Illustration Details on Attention and Comprehension in Beginning Readers","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Reading is a critical skill as it provides a gateway for other\nlearning within and outside of school. Many children struggle\nto acquire this fundamental skill. Suboptimal design of books\nfor beginning readers may be one factor that contributes to the\ndifficulties children experience. Specifically, extraneous\ndetails in illustrations (i.e., interesting but irrelevant to the story\nelements) could promote attentional competition and hamper\nemerging literacy skills. We used eye-tracking technology to\nexamine this possibility. The results of this study indicated that\nexcluding extraneous details from illustrations in a book for\nbeginning readers reduced attentional competition (indexed by\ngaze shifts away from text) and improved children’s reading\ncomprehension. This study suggests that design of reading\nmaterials for children learning to read can be optimized to\npromote literacy development in children.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"attention"},{"word":"Reading"},{"word":"Reading comprehension"},{"word":"Illustration"},{"word":"eye tracking"},{"word":"Book design"}],"section":"Publication-based-Talks","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7mx9866w","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Cassondra","middle_name":"M","last_name":"Eng","name_suffix":"","institution":"Carnegie Mellon","department":""},{"first_name":"Karrie","middle_name":"E","last_name":"Godwin","name_suffix":"","institution":"Ken State","department":""},{"first_name":"Kristen","middle_name":"A","last_name":"Boyle","name_suffix":"","institution":"Carnegie Mellon","department":""},{"first_name":"Anna","middle_name":"V","last_name":"Fisher","name_suffix":"","institution":"Carnegie Mellon","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2018-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/27764/galley/17404/download/"}]}