The construction of a high quality mental model from a complex visual display relies the capacity of learners to extract appropriate information from that display. Beginning students of meteorology complied written records of generalisations extracted from animated weather map sequences in order to prepare themselves for a subsequent prediction task. Analysis of these records revealed that much of the information extracted was perceptually salient rather than thematically relevant. This perceptual dominance effect was found for both visuospatial and temporal aspects of the display. The statements produced were deficient with regard to the causal explanations that would be necessary to build a satisfactory mental model ofthe depicted situation. These deficiencies involved both the proportion of causal material recorded and the attribution of causality on an everyday rather than a domain-appropriate basis. The limitations of the information extracted were interpreted as evidence of subjects' use of selective attention to control cognitive load in a complex, demanding processing situation and the effects of their lack of domain-specific background knowledge. Contrary to prevailing orthodoxies, the results raise the possibility that in some circumstances, animations may not be instructionally superior to static depictions because the processing demands involved can have negative effects on learning.
The effectiveness of animations containing two novel forms of animation cueing that target relations between event units rather than individual entities was compared with that of animations containing conventional entity-based cueing or no cues. These relational event unit cues (progressive path and local coordinated cues) were specifically designed to support key learning processes posited by the Animation Processing Model (Authors, 2008). Four groups of undergraduates (N = 84) studied a user-controllable animation of a piano mechanism and then were assessed for mental model quality (via a written comprehension test) and knowledge of the mechanism's dynamics (via a novel nonverbal manipulation test). Time-locked eye tracking was used to characterize participants' obedience to cues (initial engagement versus ongoing loyalty) across the learning period. For both output measures, participants in the two relational event unit cueing conditions were superior to those in the entity-based and uncued conditions. Time-locked eye tracking analysis of cue obedience revealed that initial cue engagement did not guarantee ongoing cue loyalty. The findings suggest that the Animation Processing Model provides a principled basis for designing more effective animation support.
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