On April 10, the Poynter Institute is set to release it's latest "eye tracking" study of how readers navigate the printed and online news page. The preview of the key findings is fairly suprising. Watch the video about the study at the site, and listen to this NPR Marketplace story on the forthcoming study.
We've been discussing this study (or at least the preliminary version of the results) with some interest in the newspaper office. I've got no expertise in the methodology, but I can't see how you can a result from a study like this that bears any realistic relationship to the way people actually read things. If you bring people in and tell them to read a newspaper for the study, they're bound to approach it differently than if they've grabbed the morning paper while they're having a cup of coffee and a donut before work.
Turns out there's a name for what I was talking about: the Hawthorne effect:
http://www.brasstacksdesign.com/eyetrack07.htm