Connecting human minds to computers: an empirical investigation into when and how to use animation

Instructional animations are commonly used in computer-based educational environments. However, despite the appeal of instructional animations, the factors influencing their effectiveness are still not fully understood, often making appropriate implementation in educational settings difficult. Much of the existing literature has found that animations were not superior to, or worse than, static graphics. The variety of results suggests the effectiveness of animations is influenced by a number of design factors and individual learner characteristics. One such factor is the knowledge domain an instructional animation depicts. Emerging evidence suggests that animation may be effective under certain knowledge domains. One such context is human movement.The present series of experiments systematically investigated the cognitive effects of instructional animations and informationally equivalent static graphics depicting human movement tasks across different conditions. Experiments 1 and 2 found animation was better than static graphics for a human movement task, whereas the advantage of animation was lost for a task depicting non-human movement. Experiment 3, using a human movement task, found animation was superior to static graphics. Further, there was no difference between whether participants practised or not, nor the type of practice undertaken. Experiment 4 found human movement- based animation was superior to all static graphics formats, regardless of whether they were presented sequentially or simultaneously. There was also no difference between sequential and simultaneous static graphics formats, nor was there any difference between static graphics presented in a paper-based versus computer-based format. Experiment 5 used different materials and found animation was superior to static graphics for information presented in short sections, replicating the results of Experiments 1–4. In contrast, the superiority of animation was lost for information presented in long sections, due to the transience of the information.The results from the experiments in this thesis consistently demonstrated that for tasks depicting human movement, animation is more effective than static graphics, so long as the amount of information presented does not exceed working memory limits. The benefits of animations did not extend to non-human movement domains, such as mechanical movement tasks