Rapid Serial Visual Presentation
Rapid Serial Visual Presentation
I'm not really sure of the promise of this add-on, but it seems like a worthy pursuit.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2149
This RSVP tool takes highlighted text from a website and displays a few words of it at a variable speed. Essentially, when you throw out the most dubious claims, the goal is to train you to read from its display faster than you would normally read with similar comprehension.
Presumably, after hours of reading and months of practice, my reading speed will be dramatically improved, but I am finding most internet articles to be a little lacking in length. With no real progress from my beginning speed of 500wpm, a typical BBC article takes no more than a minute to read. Instead of using the add-on for quick reads like that, I've been trying it out on Project Gutenberg books.
If anyone knows more about this stuff, please comment with some science, I'm afraid I've read to many testimonials to trust anything that makes claims like this.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2149
This RSVP tool takes highlighted text from a website and displays a few words of it at a variable speed. Essentially, when you throw out the most dubious claims, the goal is to train you to read from its display faster than you would normally read with similar comprehension.
Presumably, after hours of reading and months of practice, my reading speed will be dramatically improved, but I am finding most internet articles to be a little lacking in length. With no real progress from my beginning speed of 500wpm, a typical BBC article takes no more than a minute to read. Instead of using the add-on for quick reads like that, I've been trying it out on Project Gutenberg books.
If anyone knows more about this stuff, please comment with some science, I'm afraid I've read to many testimonials to trust anything that makes claims like this.
Whoopska | 3 years ago
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RSVP is a fascinating topic, but there are two big issues in terms of systematic training: 1., it is hard to accurately measure comprehension; 2., for corpuses that are well-suited for assessing comprehension, just as you noticed, they tend to be short and limited.
RSVP is useful as a tool for training pattern recognition (of orthography). Having familiarity with various word forms is crucial to maintaining a fast reading speed. This is a big reason why having a large vocabulary helps reading speed: even if you can figure out the meaning of a word based on context, your brain will slow down simply if the word is unfamiliar, so learning it beforehand helps reduce these slowdowns.
As a reading tool per se, though, I have two other gripes. First is the lack of dynamic adjustment in peripheral vision. PV is important for facilitating comprehension; when information density is low, it is also useful for surveying the "landscape" of reading material before your brain decides where to spend more time reading, or where to guide your eyes (a related drawback is that you lose relative positional information of text when reading on RSVP devices). The second problem is the constant display speed: if you hit a difficult bit of text, before your brain decides it wants to slow down, the text moves on. While this is arguably the purpose (forcing you to read faster), given that the word difficulties in a text is seldom, if ever, uniform, it doesn't make sense to play everything at the same speed. And unfortunately, only your brain is qualified to judge what is difficult and what isn't; furthermore, this judgment is an on-line process, done at the same time as you flip the page, laugh at puns, and analyze the text's logic and style. Just in terms of these two problems, RSVPs have a long way to go.
In any case though, this much can be said safely: you can expect training by RSVP to increase your reading speed, simply by virtue of familiarizing yourself to text flashing at you at high speeds, the induced stress factor, and increased awareness to a larger range of word forms. But there are several other critical bottlenecks that it cannot resolve. Working memory for one, vocabulary for two. If you are already on the upper end of the other processes involved in reading, you'll probably find more significant gains (and one would wonder why you don't already read very efficiently!). But RSVP in isolation will not make an expert reader out of one with a small vocabulary (for example), regardless of what some companies like to say.
RSVP is useful as a tool for training pattern recognition (of orthography). Having familiarity with various word forms is crucial to maintaining a fast reading speed. This is a big reason why having a large vocabulary helps reading speed: even if you can figure out the meaning of a word based on context, your brain will slow down simply if the word is unfamiliar, so learning it beforehand helps reduce these slowdowns.
As a reading tool per se, though, I have two other gripes. First is the lack of dynamic adjustment in peripheral vision. PV is important for facilitating comprehension; when information density is low, it is also useful for surveying the "landscape" of reading material before your brain decides where to spend more time reading, or where to guide your eyes (a related drawback is that you lose relative positional information of text when reading on RSVP devices). The second problem is the constant display speed: if you hit a difficult bit of text, before your brain decides it wants to slow down, the text moves on. While this is arguably the purpose (forcing you to read faster), given that the word difficulties in a text is seldom, if ever, uniform, it doesn't make sense to play everything at the same speed. And unfortunately, only your brain is qualified to judge what is difficult and what isn't; furthermore, this judgment is an on-line process, done at the same time as you flip the page, laugh at puns, and analyze the text's logic and style. Just in terms of these two problems, RSVPs have a long way to go.
In any case though, this much can be said safely: you can expect training by RSVP to increase your reading speed, simply by virtue of familiarizing yourself to text flashing at you at high speeds, the induced stress factor, and increased awareness to a larger range of word forms. But there are several other critical bottlenecks that it cannot resolve. Working memory for one, vocabulary for two. If you are already on the upper end of the other processes involved in reading, you'll probably find more significant gains (and one would wonder why you don't already read very efficiently!). But RSVP in isolation will not make an expert reader out of one with a small vocabulary (for example), regardless of what some companies like to say.
cognitivefun | 3 years ago
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? | 3 years ago
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