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@Regal
There's actually very little proper scientific evidence, but the trained eye can tend to spot why something is more or less readable. Contrast is a big part of it. If you read up on Gestalt, there's a lot of stuff that's relevant, especially in terms of foreground/background fields 'interfering' with each other and creating visual clash or noise. I have a special hate for Helvetica Neue, as it's a perfect example of something being excessively rationalised, to the point of breaking. It's much too geometrically consistent to be a comfortable text typeface (one example is that 'rn' and 'm' are almost indistinguishable when it's tightly set).
In print, good serif fonts tend to be easier to read, partly because the serifs help the letters to 'stick together' horizontally and form word shapes. When we read, we tend to read word shapes, not individual letters (see that word game where it doesn't matter which order the letters are in a word as long as the first and last ones are correct). That's also why all-caps text is harder to read: because you don't have ascenders and descenders and all the letters are the same height, the words are harder to distinguish. (All-caps can work for signage, though, particularly for single words.) Nowadays, though, we're so used to reading poorly designed, poorly set, poorly spaced type at inappropriate sizes, in low resolution and high contrast, that there's an argument that it's less crucial than it used to be (outside of book typography).
However, if you're interested in the details, this is a great reference book:
[ame="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Bringhurst/dp/0881792063/"]The Elements of Typographic Style: Amazon.co.uk: Robert Bringhurst: Books[/ame]
If a bit po-faced. But po-faced is a typographer's default setting, so it comes with the territory.