| Spatial contiguity effect is a stable effect in educational psychology,which means that people learn more deeply from a multimedia material when corresponding text and picture are presented near rather than far from each other.However,most of the previous studies lacked quantitative definition for the distance between text and picture,leading to inconsistent operations among different studies,which may have influenced the results.In addition,studies on reading have found that learners can extract information from the parafoveal visual area and use this information to pre-process subsequent text information,but they cannot extract effective information from the peripheral visual area(Rayner,1998,2009;Zhang et al.,2020).Based on this,our research divided the text-picture distance into the parafoveal visual distance and the peripheral visual distance.We used the eye tracking technology and different kinds of methods for measuring the cognitive load,to explore the effect of distance on the textpicture process,including the eye-movement,cognitive load,process effect and the trade-off between the perceptually intensive strategy and the memory intensive strategy while processing the text-picture information.In Experiment 1,a basic paradigm wherein participants made similarity judgments of one text card and one picture card was used as a text-picture process task,and we adopted a 2(text-picture distance:parafoveal visual distance,peripheral visual distance)× 4(card similarity:no similarity,one similarity,two similarities,three similarities)within-subject design.In Experiment 2,the more complex learning material(lightning formation lesson)was used as a text-picture process material,and we adopted a oneway between-subject design which varied the text-picture distance into the parafoveal visual distance and the peripheral visual distance.Both of the experiments measured the eye-movements,cognitive load and the process effect.In Experiment 1,we found that the integrative transitions between text and picture card in the parafoveal distance condition was significantly higher than that in the peripheral vision area condition,which means participant prefer to use the perceptually intensive strategies in the parafoveal distance condition.When only one dimension was matched,the performance of the card judgment task in the condition of parafoveal distance was better,and there was no difference in the performance of the two groups in the others.There was also no significant difference in cognitive load between the two groups.Experiment 2 also found that in the parafoveal condition,the integrative transitions was higher,and the cognitive load was lower,which means that the parafoveal group tended to adopt perception-intensive strategies.In addition,the parafoveal group also scored higher on the retention test and the transfer test.The mediating effect analysis showed that the integrative transitions between text and picture played a mediating role in the effect of text-picture distance on retention test.The results show that:(1)The text-picture distance based on the characteristics of different visual areas(parafoveal distance and peripheral visual area distance)has an influence on the text-picture processing,and the parafoveal distance caused more textpicture integrative transitions.(2)The text-picture distance affects the trade-off between gaze and working memory use.When text and picture are presented in the parafoveal visual area,the subjects prefer the perceptually intensive strategy,that is,they acquired more information through saccades,and their cognitive load was lower.On the contrary,in the peripheral visual distance condition,the subjects prefer the memory intensive strategy,they used "knowledge-in-the-head" as to replace"knowledge-in-the-world",so the cognitive load was higher.(3)As for the process effect,text-picture information presented in the parafoveal visual area didn’t promote the performance in the simple tasks,but improved the retention and transfer test in the multimedia learning task. |
PDF Full Text Request