Research On Size Perception Of Heavy Internet Users

Most of the existing researches on internet addiction were focused on the status quo of cyberspace, the causes of addiction and the personality characteristics of those addicts. And the research on cognitive characteristics of addicts is still in its infancy. Those cognitive studies suggested that internet addicted users had negative social cognition scheme and they had greater attention bias to internet related stimuli. This paper explored the size perception characteristics of heavy internet users by regulating the size of certain pictures. And it could also improve the cognitive mechanisms of heavy internet users.There are two experiments contained in this paper. Study 1 explored whether there were any significant differences between different types of internet users by regulating the image size directly; In study 2, after matching the network-related or unrelated words to the neutral words unconsciously, subjects were then asked to regulate the images. Therefore, the effect those network-related words had made on heavy internet users' size perception could have been explored. Three conclusions had been drawn:(1) The image content could affect heavy internet uses'size perception greatly. Heavy internet users would magnify the network-related pictures they had perceived. But the light internet users did not show the same feature.(2) While regulating the network-unrelated pictures, there was no significant difference between heavy internet users'size perception and the one of light internet users.(3) The network-related words could affect subjects'size perception of neutral pictures. And it was much more obvious to those heavy internet users. On the other hand, the network-unrelated words would not affect subjects'size perception of neural pictures.