Cognitive load and information retention in online news reading: analysis of the impact of multimodality

With the massive development of World Wide Web accessibility over the past decades, online newspapers have become one of the first sources of information for citizens. At the same time, the Web has strongly evolved by offering an increasing number of features as well as providing more multimodal contents such as pictures, videos and animations. In spite of a growing interest in web users’ behaviours, only few studies have addressed the issue of the impact of these changes in the particular context of online news. By using Cognitive Load Theory framework (Sweller, 1988) and providing objective measure of cognitive load, our study aims to clarify how the presence of multimodal contents could impact user’s attentional resources and information retention. Three versions of an online newspaper were developed in order to vary the modality of information presented: text only (TO); text and pictures (TP); text, pictures and animations (TPA). 92 participants with a mean age of 20 years were randomly assigned to one of the three conditions. They were asked to read three articles before answering recall and recognition questions on the content of the articles read. The same design was replicated strictly with 32 other participants (mean age 21 years) in a second experiment for collecting eye-tracking data. A MANOVA carried on the recall/recognition scores for each articles showed that there was a main effect of modality (Wilk’s λ = .863, F (6,170) = 2.167, p <.05), but only significantly different for the two first articles read (F(2,87) = 5.031, p <.01). The TP condition leads to a better score (M = .65, σ = .04) than TO (M = .50, σ = .03) or TPA conditions (M = .52, σ = .03). Additionally, both subjective and objective measures of cognitive load showed an influence of content modality. The results of this study emphasize that the presence of multimodal contents seems to influence the amount of information that users retain after reading online newspapers. The presence of images related to the content of the article improves information retention, while the addition of peripheral animated components leads to a lower performance. However, these effects appear only if the subject continues the browsing experience before having to retrieve information in memory, which could explain the absence of effects of this type previously reported in the literature.