Eye catchers in comics: Controlling eye movements in reading pictorial and textual media

As to Japanese comics, in which story progresses from right top to left bottom on each page, it has been said that the most typical eye movement shapes inversed z pattern, i.e. reading from the right to left of a line of panels, then moving to the right of next line, and reading to the left. However, there are almost no empirical data obtained by measuring real eye movements in comic reading, and nothing is known about what kinds of visual information contained in comic pages guide readers’ eye movements. Our purpose of this study is to present experimental data about Japanese comic reading, and discuss about factors in comic stimulus guiding eye movements. There are many ways to characterize the eye movement in comic reading. In our research, we analyzed its fixation pattern on panels, and focused on panels which were not attended by readers. We aimed to illustrate how changes in configuration of elements of comic pages have effects on readers’ eye movements by increasing attention to these panels.