Conflict arousal and curiosity

xii350hlm.;bib.;ill.;indek

Effects of prior guessing on intentional and incidental paired-associate learning

With Turkish words as stimulus terms and corresponding English words as response terms, intentional paired-associate learning was better when the pairs were simply presented once or twice, but incidental learning was better when Ss were required to guess the meaning of the Turkish word before being shown the response term and better when the guess was restricted by a category word (the PG condition) than when no clue was given (the FG condition). Ss could produce more guesses in 8 sec when exposed to a PG item than when exposed to an FG item. Both the superiority of the PG condition over the FG condition and its superiority over double presentation occurred only when S tried to guess the English word (whether in response to instructions or spontaneously) and only when the pair of words exposed after guessing supplied the information that S had been trying to guess. The results are discussed with special reference to the notions of subjective uncertainty and epistemic curiosity

Visual aesthetic appeal speeds processing of complex but not simple icons

Over the last decade there has been a shift in emphasis from interface usability to interface appeal. Very few studies, however, have examined the link between the two. The current study examined the possibility that aesthetic appeal may affect user performance. In a visual search task designed to mimic user searches of interface displays, participants were asked to search for a target icon in an array of distractors. Target icons were varied orthogonally along two dimensions, complexity (which is known to affect visual search for icons in displays) and aesthetic appeal. The results showed that visually simple icons were found faster than visually complex icons, replicating previous findings. More importantly, aesthetic appeal interacted with icon complexity, significantly reducing search times for complex but not simple icons. These findings provide empirical evidence to support the idea that aesthetic appeal can influence performance