Learning procedures: the role of working memory in multimedia learning experiences

Discourse processing-examining our everyday language experiences

Studies of discourse processing focus on the ways in which readers and listeners comprehend language. The linguistic segments of interest to the field tend to be larger than sound, word, or sentence-level units; they include the books and conversational communications that comprise our everyday cognitive and social interactions. The current review focuses on discourse comprehension (specifically text processing), highlighting three core issues of primary interest to the research field. First, we outline the particular elements that make up naturalistic discourse activity. Second, we identify potential interactions among the elements, and how investigations of these interactions have resulted in influential frameworks for the field. Finally, we examine contemporary work (both theoretical and applied) that might further enhance current accounts of discourse processing. As appropriate, the review includes references to relevant empirical research outlining the processes that guide, and are guided by, our discourse experiences. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Moving through imagined space: Mentally simulating locomotion during spatial description reading

Readers mentally simulate the perceptual and motoric elements related through text. Sound is one perceptual characteristic of these embodied simulations that has received little attention. Two experiments tested whether movement sounds (walking vs. running) or metronome pulses (fast vs. slow) would modulate reading speed and memory for two different types of spatial descriptions, route and survey. Route descriptions describe environments from a first-person, ground-level perspective whereas survey descriptions use an aerial overview perspective. Experiment 1 demonstrated that route description readers altered their reading speed in correspondence with both movement and metronome sounds, progressing through descriptions faster when hearing fast-paced versus slow-paced sounds. When reading survey descriptions, however, readers only modulated their reading speed while listening to metronome pulses. Those who showed the greatest reading time effects with the route description and footstep sounds also showed difficulty solving inferences from the survey perspective. Experiment 2 demonstrated that movement sounds influenced perceptions of distance traveled such that estimates of environmental scale increased after listening to running versus walking sounds. Taken together these results demonstrate that route description readers mentally simulate a journey through a described world, and these simulations and the resulting spatial memories can be guided by auditory information.

Spatial Mental Representation: Implications for Navigation System Design

Similarities exist in how people process and represent spatial information and in the factors that contribute to disorientation, whether one is moving through airspace, on the ground, or surgically within the body. As such, design principles for presenting spatial information should bear similarities across these domains but also be somewhat specific to each. In this chapter, we review research in spatial cognition and its application to navigation system design for within-vehicle, aviation, and endoscopic navigation systems. Taken together, the research suggests three general principles for navigation system design consideration. First, multimedia displays should present spatial information visually and action and description information verbally. Second, display organizations should meet users' dynamic navigational goals. Third, navigation systems should be adaptable to users' spatial information preferences. Designers of adaptive navigation display technologies can maximize the effectiveness of those technologies by appealing to the basic spatial cognition processes employed by all users while conforming to user's domain-specific requirements.

Representational flexibility and specificity following spatial descriptions of real-world environments

Current theories are mixed with regard to the nature of mental representations following spatial description reading. Whereas some findings argue that individuals' representations are invariant following text-based, map-based, or first-person experience, other studies have suggested that representations can also exhibit considerable flexibility. In the current project we investigated the influences of spatial description perspectives and depictions on the nature of mental representations. In Experiment 1, participants exhibited more flexibility following survey, compared to route, spatial descriptions. With extended study time, though, flexibility following route descriptions increased. In Experiment 2, complementary maps further enhanced flexibility for route-based descriptions. Interestingly, increased exposure to these maps actually reduced flexibility following survey descriptions. These results demonstrate that the nature of our spatial mental representations depends upon a variety of factors; delineating these factors is critical for resolving debates concerning the malleable and invariant characteristics of spatial memory.

Extended experience benefits spatial mental model development with route but not survey descriptions

Spatial descriptions symbolically represent environmental information through language and are written in two primary perspectives: survey, analogous to viewing a map, and route, analogous to navigation. Readers of survey or route descriptions form abstracted perspective flexible representations of the described environment, or spatial mental models. The present two experiments investigated the maintenance of perspective in spatial mental models as a function of description perspective and experience (operationalized through repetition), and as reflected in self-paced reading times. Experiment 1 involved studying survey and route descriptions either once or three times, then completing map drawing and true/false statement verification. Results demonstrated that spatial mental models are readily formed with survey descriptions, but require relatively more experience with route descriptions; further, some limited evidence suggests perspective dependence in spatial mental models, even following extended experience. Experiment 2 measured self-paced reading during three successive description presentations. Average reading times over the three presentations reduced more for survey relative to route descriptions, and there was no evidence for perspective specificity in resulting spatial mental models. This supports Experiment 1 findings demonstrating the relatively time-consuming nature of acquiring spatial mental models from route, but not survey descriptions. Results are discussed with regard to developmental, discourse processing, and spatial mental model theory.