Rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) for professional tasks: A trial study of an accelerated reading display for citation relevance judgments by domain experts

A high-resolution Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) computer display system was used by domain-expert subjects to make relevance judgments about articles related to the subjects' own queries. The article title, abstract, and author fields were downloaded from Dialog databases and prepared as custom citations for review. This study used eight domain-expert subjects, actual work-related queries, and data from current publication databases to simulate real-world tasks. Approximately 100 citations per subject were viewed in groups of ten, and the experts used a 0--10 point magnitude scale to score the relevance of each citation to their query. The computer display resolution was 1600 x 1200 dots per inch. Standardized baseline reading speed, in words per minute (wpm), and comprehension and vocabulary grade level for each subject were established using the Nelson-Denny Reading Test. The experts scored one group of ten citations using Microsoft WORD, and then subsequent groups were scored using RSVP. In the RSVP mode, subjects viewed individual words, enlarged on the center of the computer screen, at rates beginning at their baseline rate (range: 154--339 wpm) and increasing in 150 wpm increments up to 1350 wpm. Subjects also scored the same citations a second time using laser printouts. Pearson r correlations between the computer-display-system and printout scores averaged 0.79 for WORD and 0.63 for RSVP for all display speeds. Using a paired t-test, the differences in the correlations were found not to be statistically significant, regardless of display speed. The conclusion was that the RSVP and WORD relevance judgment correlations were comparable to prior test-retest relevance judgments studies. These findings suggest that RSVP or WORD may be a successful alternative to printouts when using high-resolution displays. Because the correlation differences were not statistically significant at RSVP display rates up to 1350 wpm, future research was suggested to examine using RSVP displays to make the task of finding relevant articles more efficient for domain-expert users. Also, based on prior research, RSVP may prove similarly useful for sight-impaired and foreign-language domain-experts.