Oculomotor control while viewing CRTs and hard-copy displays

Two studies were conducted to examine the effect of hard-copy print and CRT screens on oculomotor control during text-reading. The first study demonstrated that accomodation was more accurate to hard-copy print than to high-resolution screens, which were more accurate than low-resolution screens. The spatial frequency channels activated by each display were evaluated by measuring the effect of display adaptation on the contrast sensitivity function and found to correlate directly with the resolution of the screens. The second study demonstrated a significant increase in the number of long fixations, fixation frequency and saccadic length for CRT viewing as opposed to hard-copy print. In both cases, visual search performance and reading speed was better for hard-copy print and high-resolution screens as compared to low-resolution screens. It was concluded that screen resolution is an important variable to consider in the design of CRTs.