Effective Design for Decreasing Cognitive Load on the Small Screen of PDA
Abstract: The purpose of this study was to examine how presentation format of text in a small screen of PDA had an impact on cognitive load when a user was reading and summarizing a reading text. Two presentation formats, 1) page-turn and 2) scrolling, were examined in reading and problem solving task with PDA. The page-turn format has a page-turn button without any scrolled text, and the scrolling format has a scroll bar to read. Dual-task was applied to this experiment to measure Reaction Time (RT) to an audio signal for a secondary task as a direct indicator of cognitive load. Twenty Korean undergraduate students (25% Male and 75% Female) participated to this study. There was no significant difference of RT between page-turn and scrolling in the reading session. However, RT in the scrolling format of the problem solving session was significantly increased. This result indicated that a user of PDA needs more cognitive efforts to assemble information in a page-turn format.
Presider: Philip Barker, University of Teesside