Study Skills
Regressions: The Habit That Makes You Read Everything Twice
Your eyes move in many little jumps to read. In an average adult reader, roughly one eye movement in ten goes backwards. These backward jumps are called regressions. People believe that these improve their understanding of the text, but 80% of them are unnecessary and costing you time.
By Arjuna Rupasinha
Introduction
Your eyes move in many little jumps to read. In an average adult reader, roughly one eye movement in ten goes backwards. These backward jumps are called regressions. People believe that these improve their understanding of the text, but 80% of them are unnecessary and costing you time.
Two kinds of regressions
Not all regressions are waste.
Corrective regressions are helpful. These improve your understanding of a text because you misread a word, a phrase was ambiguous, or there was another issue with the text. Rereading to repair your understanding of text is important.
Habitual regressions are unhelpful. The eye loops back although nothing was misunderstood. Sometimes attention drifted and the loop is the eye idling while the mind returns. Sometimes it is an insecurity e.g. you wonder "did I really get that?". Sometimes your second look is at a sentence you understood perfectly well the first time. Dense or unfamiliar text makes it worse, because everything feels slightly uncertain. The eye retreats reflexively. The trigger is the habit, not the comprehension.
Most readers cannot tell you which kind they are doing, because eye movements are almost entirely outside awareness. What you can feel is the aggregate. Reading takes longer than it should.
What it costs
10-15% of your eye movements are regressions and 80% of those are unnecessary. That is around 10% of your reading time wasted on regressions.
For a student reading twenty hours a week, that is around two hours. Over a ten-week term, the number is closer to twenty hours. Most of your reading is spent rereading sentences you understood.
The habit persists partly because it feels responsible. Text reads smoothly on a second pass, and smoothness is easily mistaken for learning. It is not. It is recognition, which is fundamentally different to understanding.
How to cut the waste
1) Use a pacer. A finger, a pen, a cursor, moving steadily forward under the line you are reading. The eye is built to track motion, and looping backwards against a forward-moving target is difficult.
2) Preview before you read. Knowing what is coming up in a text helps you to prevent regressions for the purpose of recognising the text.
3) Read to the end of the paragraph or section, pause, and recall what it said. Often, you will find that you can work out the meaning of something from the context of the paragraph.
4) Pay attention. Distracted reading dramatically increases the number of regressions.
Regressions aren’t always bad
Difficult texts may need to be read more than once. If you are optimising for learning, you may need to read something several times to understand a deeper meaning. Make sure your regressions are intentional.
Habitual regressions are bad. You’ll lose a large amount of time over a term to them. They go unnoticed and negatively impact your grades. You’ll feel the hours when you are up grinding your assigned reading at midnight.