Search

Reading strategies and cognitive styles have been the objective of many researchers. However, the relation between these two concepts remains unclear. This paper is focusing on three goals. Firstly, we verify the reliability of the eye-tracking indicators of risky and conservative reading style. Secondly, we aim to explore an additional eye-tracking pattern that may reflect the reading style on the global level. Thirdly, we explore the relationship between reading style and the holistic/analytic cognitive style. The study is based on a combination of Compound Figure Test (CFT) as a main tool for analyzing cognitive style and eye-tracking study consisting of several text stimuli related to verify reading style patterns. Results showed stability across the reading tasks, which validates for the usefulness and reliability of original Rayner's as well as the new additional eye-tracking metrics. The stability of the eye-tracking metrics allows us to treat them as a behavioral profile in information processing that may be viewed as a stable personality trait known as reading style. However, the eye-tracking results and the CFT global preference score did not show a detectably close relation between cognitive style and reading style. In conclusion, we also discuss the possibility of applying these eye-tracking patterns to foreign language material design.

When spatial information is depicted on univariate or multivariate maps, different visualization designs should be considered to fit the designs to suit the target audience and define the map's general purpose and therefore also the map user's expected cognitive processes. Although multivariate maps have attracted research for decades, only several studies have compared the effectiveness of maps that use extrinsic and intrinsic encoding styles, and even fewer have tried to incorporate other map-related factors that could significantly affect the user's performance and clarify the relationship between the selected encoding style's efficiency and the user's cognitive processes. In this paper, we report on an empirical replication study focused on the performance differences of experienced map users solving a task using a map and the possible effect of their cognitive styles on the efficiency of bivariate map encoding styles and the map task type. For the experiment, we recruited 77 spatial planning and geography university students in China considered as experienced map users. The study indicated that extrinsic visualizations outperformed intrinsic visualizations in the main observed variables of correctness and response time but not always significantly. A detailed analysis of the tasks, which involved the use of either one variable or two variables concurrently, confirmed our hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]