I've always considered those kinds of studies suspect. When I'm reading, human-language text, I spend most of the time going forward. Maybe I'll skip to an earl

I've always considered those kinds of studies suspect. When I'm reading, human-language text, I spend most of the time going forward. Maybe I'll skip to an earlier part of the sentence if it turns out to be a garden-path parsing, or to a previous sentence to re-acquaint myself with context. Those are exceptional cases. In code, I'm frequently tracing back and forth through a block, looking for specific information in different lines. I think that the coloration helps to provide "landmarks" for non-linear traversal of the code. I'd consider color-free code to be more similar to un-punctuated text, than I would consider colored text to be to colored code.