The Effect of Colored Overlays on an Individual's Rate of Reading when the Font is 'Quiet' versus 'Busy'

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Date

2008

Disciplines

Psychology | Social and Behavioral Sciences

Advisor

Richard Wielkiewicz, Psychology

Abstract

The study examined the combined effect of colored overlays and either "quiet" or "busy" type fonts upon reading rate and accuracy in 64 college-aged participants. Participants were randomly assigned to read either a "quiet" or "busy" font and asked to read two passages, once with a Iterative numerical solvers are essential in many areas of engineering. Most high performance solvers rely on lower-level programming languages for the backbone of the computation. By using newer extensions to programs like Matlab, engineers can save time and energy that would be lost to rewriting code and create more readable code that is also easier to debug. Two such extensions are examined: Star-P and the Distributed Computing Toolbox. We found that while Star-P is very easy to program, there are some applications that Star-P cannot run well. The alternative, DCT, required some knowledge of data handling, but showed better performance for each processor used. The important result is that there are always compromises made when using higher-level languages for high performance computing.

Chosen overlay and once without. Overall, participants had similar rates of reading when they took the rate of reading test the first time with or without their chosen overlay. When they took the test the second time, rates of reading for those who used an overlay were faster than the rates of reading for those who did not use an overlay. However, for the busy font condition participants actually performed worse when they were using their colored overlay. Overall, the results of this study support previous research that it is the lines of the text which contribute to visual stress and reading difficulties.

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