Organization, verbal complexity, linguistic markers, and typographical prompts can all impact a readers attention. Texts that present better guideposts or means of signaling relationships for the reader are more likely to provide every reader with a more coherent understanding of their content.  

Text Characteristics

A reader’s background knowledge or reading skills will impact their attention and ability to read different texts. Readers with better developed or efficient ways to  allocate their attention will identify relationships in a text more easily, and will develop a more coherent understanding of a text


Reader Characteristics

- Text Characteristics
- Reader Characteristics

San Jose State University

The reader's attention is an important component of comprehension, because if they are not able to maintain their attention, they will miss relationships between elements in the text. Texts will often require more attention than their readers can offer. 

Attention allocation in developing a situation model

Van Den Broek, P. (2010). Using texts in science education: Cognitive processes and knowledge visualization. Science 328(5977), 453-456. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1182594

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