[LINK] Why do they do it?

[Jan Whitaker]

At 01:25 PM 25/11/2004, jeff.evans at iird.vic.gov.au wrote:
>Interestingly
>    Eyetrack shows that when quizzed, those that viewed the multimedia
>    version of the "Dangerous Business" story had a lower retention rate
>    than those that read it as text. But it also makes the observation that
>    "multiple streams of conflicting information" such as an animated photo,
>    text, and audio, may be too much for a user to take in all at once. This
>    is particularly true if the user isn't given any control of how to view
>    the story.  <http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/jeffglick.htm>

That is really a blast from my past!  When in grad school back in the 70s 
[yes, I'm that old!], my research area was an examination of the effects of 
multiple communication channels:  visual, audio and text, with children.  I 
was going to tell the results which I believe support the above, but can't 
recall the details well enough to be certain.  What I do know is combining 
audio and text as the concurrent channels was the worst in supporting the 
task.  My take on that was that the brain processes those two forms of 
verbal information at different rates and does not use them as 
complimenting channels.  That doesn't mean you should stop reading to you 
children! :-)

And just for the record, this was properly constructed experimental 
research, not self-report surveys which are notoriously unreliable, just 
like witness statements.

Jan


JLWhitaker Associates
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at melbpc.org.au  --  http://member.melbpc.org.au/~jwhit/whitentr.htm
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