This study examined the impacts of adding emotional design features to a multimedia lesson (color alone, anthropomorphism alone, or color & anthropomorphism together) on college students' affective processes (measured by ratings of experienced emotion during learning), cognitive processes (measured by eye-tracking metrics), and learning…

Crises such as natural disasters or pandemics negatively impact the mental health of the affected community, increasing rates of depression, anxiety, or stress. It has been proposed that this stems in part from crisis-related stimuli triggering negative reactions that interrupt daily life. Given the frequency and prominence of crisis events, it is…

With the increased sophistication of technology, humans have the possibility to offload a variety of tasks to algorithms. Here, we investigated whether the extent to which people are willing to offload an attentionally demanding task to an algorithm is modulated by the availability of a bonus task and by the knowledge about the algorithm's…

Discourse-based interviews (DBIs) uncover tacit knowledge within written composing processes. Existing visual research methodologies offer tools for a necessary expansion of DBI to the study of tacit knowledge in visual and multimodal texts. This article outlines a feminist application of eye tracking as a visual research method used in…

There is now a well-established literature showing that people anticipate upcoming concepts and words during language processing. Commonsense knowledge about typical event sequences and verbal selectional preferences can contribute to anticipating what will be mentioned next. We here investigate how temporal discourse connectives…

Two visual world experiments investigated the priming of form (e.g., phonology) during language processing. In Experiment 1, participants heard high cloze probability sentences like "In order to have a closer look, the dentist asked the man to open his . . ." while viewing visual arrays with objects like a predictable target mouth,…

Chinese subtitling of English trailers is essential for marketing foreign films in China, and there is a need to focus on audience reception. Ideal subtitles are expected to provide a necessary aid to the audience but to attract as little attention as possible. Paralinguistic factors like punctuation can influence the audience's attention and…

Providing single-modality cueing (either visual cueing or auditory cueing) in multimedia lessons does not consistently improve learning outcomes. In 3 eye-tracking experiments, some students learned an onscreen lesson with an oral explanation of graphics and then took a posttest on the material (no cues group). Across all 3 experiments, students…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders typically exhibit reduced visual attention towards social stimuli relative to neurotypical individuals. Importantly, however, attention is not a static process, and it remains unclear how such effects may manifest over time. Exploring these momentary changes in gaze behaviour can more clearly illustrate…

Anthropomorphizing graphical elements in multimedia learning materials improves learning outcomes. The reasons for enhanced learning are unclear. We extended a seminal anthropomorphism study in order to examine whether the effect of anthropomorphisms on learning outcomes, both immediate and delayed, is caused by the anthropomorphized elements'…

Existing research shows that the order in which evidence arrives can bias its evaluation and the resulting decision in favor of information encountered early on. We used eye-tracking to study the underlying cognitive mechanisms in the context of incentivized financial choices based on real world market data. Subjects learned about the…

Attribute amnesia (Chen & Wyble, 2015, 2016) demonstrates that we may not always be able to spontaneously retrieve a simple attribute of a visual object (e.g., its color) for conscious report, even though the object had just been the target in a visual task. Attribute amnesia has been suggested to reflect a lack of consolidation of the…

Previous research has revealed conflicting results with regard to the role of the magnocellular visual system in reading and dyslexia. In order to investigate this further, the present study examined the relationship between performance on two magnocellular tasks (temporal gap detection and coherent motion), reading rate (oral and silent), and…

Conflict-adaptation effects (i.e., reduced response-time costs on high-conflict trials following high-conflict trials) supposedly represent our cognitive system's ability to regulate itself according to current processing demands. However, currently it is not clear whether these effects reflect conflict-triggered, active regulation, or passive…

Where the veracity of a statement is in question, listeners tend to interpret disfluency as signaling dishonesty. Previous research in deception suggests that this results from a speaker model, linking lying to cognitive effort and effort to disfluency. However, the disfluency-lying bias occurs very quickly: Might listeners instead simply…