If older users of multimedia displays could select among presentation options, would they choose display combinations that supported their performance? After three short touch-screen tasks which measured the perceptual and cognitive abilities of 50 older adults, they answered questions about a route on an online map that could be accompanied by written and/or spoken text. Half the participants saw animated routes; and they were less accurate answering questions than those who saw static routes but this did not affect people’s multimedia choices which, although diverse, were systematic. Spoken text was more often selected by people who had lower scores on the spatial working memory task, than by the older adults with higher scores. This suggests that older people with cognitive limitations recognise ways in which multimedia information can be supportive

Belt, S

De Roure, David

Dimov, S

Petrie, Helen

Pham, DT

Soroka, AJ

Wright, Patricia

English

Southampton (e-Prints Soton)

   route between two locations in the UK which was shown on  a  map  above  the  question  (see  Fig.  4).  For  all participants  half  the  questions  involved  only  one  map,       Fig. 4.  Screen display in the main Routes task  whereas  the  other  eight  questions  required  comparing information from three routes.  By  tapping  buttons  on  the  left  of  the  screen,  people chose  to  work  with  the  map  alone,  or  a  map  plus  an auditory description of the route from a female synthetic voice  (Microsoft  SAM),  or  a  map  plus  a  written description of the route that was identical to the auditory information and shown to the left of the map, or all three information  sources:  map  +  written  text  +  spoken  text. People answered questions about 16 routes, continuing at their own pace with ample time to change their mind about the  way  information  was  presented.  If  selected,  the  text appeared all at once on the screen. For  half  the  participants  the  highlighted  route  on  the map was animated for all 16 routes and progressed up the screen in synchrony with the voice reading the text, taking on  average  32.5s  to  complete  the  route.  For  the  other participants  the  highlighted  route  between  start  and destination was shown already completed on a static map.  To cope with the non-standard pronunciation of some place  names,  the  text-to-speech  synthesizer  did  not  read the text shown on screen but read a parallel text in which place  names  were  spelt  in  the  way  that  resulted  in appropriate pronunciation. All trials began with a question, to which participants responded by navigating to the appropriate map using the top  beige  panel  on  the  left  of  the  screen  where  regions within the UK were listed (e.g. Scotland, Wales, Midlands, etc).  When  one  of  these  regions  was  tapped,  the  panel changed  to  show  four  pairs  of  starting  points  and destinations.  This  two-level  hierarchic  design  was  an attempt to comply with the suggestion that menu structures for older users should be shallow [19], while recognizing that an alphabetic listing of all 32 pairs of starting points and  destinations  would    probably  seem  confusing,  and would be contrary to the evidence that limiting the number of choices required at any one time can be helpful when adults  have  cognitive  problems  [20].  Other research has established that having navigation options remain visible alongside digital documents can help readers [21]. No route information was displayed in the centre of the screen until presentation options had been selected from the lower green panel on the left of the screen. The panel remained  visible  throughout  the  trial,  so  presentation options could be changed at any point. Selections did not carry over from one trial to the next but had to be made at the outset of every trial. I.  RESULTS In  a  debriefing  interview  people  said  they  found  the touch-screen easy to use (mean rating 1.86 on a scale from 1=very easy to 7=very difficult). Across all 16 trials 78% of answers to the route questions were correct. There were no  accuracy  differences  between  men  (mean  2.9  errors) and women (mean 2.8 errors). However, more errors were made when the routes were animated (mean 4.04, sd 2.58) than when they were not (mean 2.96, sd 1.5) (c2(1)=3.3, p<0.05, one tailed). It was also noticed that the voice was more  often  selected  (76.6%  trials)  when  the  route  was animated than when it was static (37.5% trials).  In  the  routes  task,  most  people  retained  their  chosen multimedia  combination  throughout  the  16  trials  and  so    could be classified by this choice. Table 1 summarises the distribution of dominant choices, and shows the diversity among  these  volunteers.  However,  the  data  from  seven people were not included either for technical reasons or because their choices varied (4 had animated routes, 3 had static  routes).  Although  the  biggest  single  group  (15 people) chose to work with the map alone, nearly twice as many (28) chose to work with the map plus some form of verbal support. Table 1 also shows that those selecting the addition of written text were more accurate (c2(1)=12.47, p<0.01). Table I. Multimedia choices and performance on Routes Multimedia Chosen N  Age  Accuracy         (SD) Map only  15  67.2  11.4 (2.4) Map+Audio  10  69.0  11.7 (1.6) Map+Text  10  67.7  14.0 (1.6) Map+Aud+Txt  8  64.6  14.0 (2.2)  Of central concern in this study was how the pattern of choices  depicted  in  Table  I  would  relate  to  pretest performance.    Table  II  summarises  performance  on  the three  pretests,  and  shows  that  although  the  group  who chose map+audio had the lowest score on Visual Search, as  might  be  expected,  this  was  not  the  case  for  those choosing map+audio+text. Rather, it was people with the lowest  Spatial  Working  Memory  scores  who  were  most likely to select audio.   Table II.  Accuracy on each of the three pretests Multimedia Chosen Visual Search Auditory STM Spatial WM Map only  7.4  4.9  3.1 Map+Audio  6.3  4.3  1.6 Map+Text  7.9  4.0  2.9 Map+Aud+Txt  7.7  4.9  1.9  Of  the  15  people  with  good  scores  on  the  Spatial Working  Memory  task  (having  four  or  more  of  the  six items correct) only one person chose to listen, whereas of the 24 people who scored two or less correct on the Spatial task, ten chose to listen (c2(1)=3.3, p<0.05). II.  DISCUSSION These  older  participants  found  the  touch-screen computer easy to use and most of them readily agreed to return  for  a  second  session  if  invited  (a  few  had  health problems). Because these volunteers were a self-selected sample,  who  therefore  can  be  assumed  to  have  a  fairly positive attitude towards computer technology, no claims about  the  generality  of  this  observation  are  appropriate. Nevertheless, their interactive experience while taking part in this study, with no keyboard involved, would most likely have  been  very  different  from  any  previous  experience with using computers they might have had. The  slightly  less  accurate  performance  with  the animated  routes  may  have  reflected  pacing  problems. Breaking  the  route  into  shorter  segments  which  people could move between at their own pace would have been one way of having the advantages of animation directing the viewer’s attention in synchrony with the voice without the disadvantage of the viewer needing to keep pace with the route’s progress up the screen. This suggests possible boundary conditions to the multimedia principles arising from  educational  research  [2].  That  literature  predicts enhanced  performance  from  combining  animation  and audio,  but  the  educational  research  has  often  involved students  studying  for  a  memory  test.  In  contrast,  the present study was more akin to an open-book reading task where  information  only  has  to  be  consulted  rather  than memorized.  Both  cognitive  demands  and  available resources may be critical factors determining the effects of multimedia combinations. In a study of older people using printed leaflets, it has been found that older people can be impaired by graphics that have no detrimental effects on younger adults [22]. The importance of knowing the boundary conditions of research  findings  is  again  highlighted  when  the  present findings  are  compared  with  those  of  [23]  where undergraduates  learned  a  procedural  task  of  how  to bandage  a  hand.  That  study  reported  no  advantage  for animation (a video) over text-plus-graphics, although the video was better than either just the text or just the static graphics. Again both the task and the participants differed from  the  present  study.  So  simplistic  advice  based  on single  studies  seems  unlikely  to  be  useful  in  relation  to multimedia  combinations.  Instead  a  task  taxonomy  in terms  of  processing  resources  required  to  do  the  task (memory demands were small in the present study), and other  content  and  contextual  factors,  would  be  an advantage  for  knowing  how  best  to  provide  multimedia information to specific audiences. It is already known that people who do not find reading easy, and people who are not native speakers of the language of the text on screen, are  more  likely  to  select  spoken  text  when  following instructions from the screen [24]. The greater accuracy of those people who chose written text is open to several interpretations. It might be the case that  the  text  was a supportive adjunct in this task, or it could be that people who felt comfortable reading the text on screen were visually better able to cope with the map. If they  were  better  readers  for  sensory  reasons  this  would have been expected to show in performance on the Visual Search pretest. Table 1 suggests that there may have been such a tendency but it was not statistically significant. This issue could be pursued either with a larger sample or with a different measure of ability to read from the screen, but it seems  scarcely  worth  establishing  that  people  with difficulty reading from the screen are unlikely to choose support from written text. The  main  finding  of  interest  in  this  study  is  that  the audio was most frequently chosen by those older people who  had  problems  doing  the  Spatial  Working  Memory task. It is possible that this may relate to a difference in cognitive styles that some researchers have referred to as the  distinction  between  imagers  and  verbalisers  [25].  If 

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Cognitive support for older people from multimedia options

Cognitive support for older people from multimedia options

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