Influences of Blogs’ typologies and content on cognitive and emotional behavior. An exploratory study with Eye Tracker

Literature suggests a significant relation between the use of blogs (intended as multimedia and interactive products) and the improvement of cognitive strategies: the management of a blog can be used to explore multimedia information processing. Moreover, emotional information is able to capture attention and to enhance memory in cognitive tasks. Our study was aimed at exploring the link among blogging, multimedia processing and emotions by means of eye-tracking technology. Five types of blogs were created, each including a neutral and an emotional post. Twenty-four students were then asked to explore the blogs while their eye-movements where tracked. Then they were asked to answer questionnaires about cognitive style, emotions and memory questions. Results showed that text was fixated longer than images and emotional posts were fixated longer than neutral ones. Females explore blogs more accurately and score better in accidental learning, which is fostered by medium fixation lengths