Effects of Visuospatial Cues on Instructional Static and Dynamic Visualizations on Learner Mental Model Constructions

Introduction

When dynamic visualizations are displayed, several components move simultaneously and compete for learners’ limited attention capacity. Overlapping actions of several components might cause confusion and prevent learners from discriminating between thematically-essential and thematically-nonessential components (e.g., Boucheix & Lowe, 2010; Boucheix et al., 2013; Hegarty et al., 2003; Kriz & Hegarty, 2007; Lowe & Boucheix, 2011, 2016). In terms of the structure of mechanical systems, some components are physically small in size and have slight moving amplitude, while other components are physically voluminous and have extensive moving amplitude which are more visually conspicuous. Large components with more extensive moving amplitude inherently attract more visual attention than smaller components with slight moving amplitude (Boucheix & Lowe, 2010; Lowe & Boucheix, 2011). Due to the incongruence between thematic relevance, moving amplitude, and component size of the components in a mechanical system during its operational procedure, learners might be attracted by visually-conspicuous but thematically-nonessential components but miss the visually-inconspicuous but thematically-essential components and undermine the quality of mental models (Boucheix & Lowe, 2010; Lowe & Boucheix, 2011). The presence of visuospatial cues is assumed to modify the inherent property of some components in a mechanical system (Boucheix & Lowe, 2010) by directing learners’ attention to be equivalently distributed to each component rather than to the visually-conspicuous but thematically-nonessential components (Lowe & Boucheix, 2011) and thereby attain a comprehensive understanding of the operational procedure of a mechanical system.