College Student\u27s Need for Cognition and World-Wide Web Viewing Behavior

The growing significance of the World-Wide-Web as a vehicle for disseminating information has led to greater interest in the psychological concomitants of web viewing. Recently Cacioppo, Petty, Feinstein, and Jarvis (1996) speculated that individuals show stable dispositions with respect to their need to process information. The present report reflects an interim analysis of data from a study exploring the relationship between college students\u27 need for cognition (indexed by scores on Cacioppo, Petty, and Kao\u27s (1984) Need for Cognition Scale ), and their preferences for viewing web pages. Thirty-one college student volunteers viewed a series of 48 images of actual web pages varying in graphic complexity. Subjects rated each page on Likert scales for attractiveness, effectiveness, and ease of reading; viewing times were recorded automatically by the computer. In addition to completing the Need for Cognition Scale, subjects completed Oltman, Raskin, and Witkin\u27s (1971) Group Embedded Figures Test , which yielded an index of field independence. Results indicated that neither need for cognition nor field independence was correlated with overall ratings of web images. However, rated image attractiveness and effectiveness, and actual viewing time, were significantly correlated with each other, and with self-reported hours participants spent surfing the web . Images which contained a high number of pictures compared to text (picture-intensive images) were rated significantly more favorably than images containing relatively lower such ratios (text-intensive images)