Effects Of Emotional Design And Cognitive Load On Multimedia Learning

Emotional design refers to the use of a series of design features to design learning materials to enhance the fun and attractiveness of the materials.The effect of emotional design on multimedia learning is unstable.Existing research ignores several issues: First,emotional design is manipulated by changing the visual elements in the animation.Studies have shown that animation presents fast,and when learners are unfamiliar with learning materials,their extraneous cognitive cognitive load will increase,resulting in inefficient learning.Animation may increase the learner’s extraneous cognitive load and limit the positive effect of emotional design on learning.Second,in most studies of emotional design,the learner prior knowledge experience level is low.The previous knowledge amount can measure the learner intrinsic cognitive load level during the learning process.Lower the knowledge experience level,higher the learner intrinsic cognitive load.Some studies have found that the level of intrinsic cognitive load will affect the effectiveness of instructional design.Whether the effect of emotional design on multimedia learning is also affected by the intrinsic cognitive load(determined by the learner’s knowledge experience level)remains to be confirmed.Third,some studies have found that emotional design can reduce the difficulty of learners’ perception of materials(intrinsic cognitive load),the total amount of cognitive resources is limit,and learners with lower intrinsic cognitive load can use more resources to carry out Conducive to the processing of learning(germane cognitive load).However,the occurrence of germane cognitive load is related to the learner’s initiative in learning.If the learner enthusiasm is not high,learning will have no effect.Germane cognitive load levels may affect the effects of emotional design.In summary,the level of cognitive load may cause emotional design to have different effects on multimedia learning.This study combines emotional design and cognitive load.According to the different relationship between different types of cognitive load and learning effect,three experiments are designed to explore whether cognitive load plays a moderating role in the impact of emotional design on multimedia learning.And it is clear which type of load works.The research also uses eye movement technology to provide more objective evidence support for the learning results.Experiment 1 adopts 2(emotional design form: positive emotional design,neutral emotional design)×2(extraneous cognitive load: cue,no cue)subject design;experiment 2 adopts 2(emotional design form: Positive emotional design,neutral emotional design)×2(intrinsic cognitive load: high knowledge experience,low knowledge experience)subject design;Experiment 3 adopts 2(emotional design form:positive emotional design,neutral emotional design)× 2(germane cognitive load:inductive,non-inductive)Subject design.Through the experimental results and discussion,this study draws the following findings:(1)Emotional design and extraneous cognitive load have no interaction on learners’ emotions,learning motivation,eye movement patterns and learning results.It shows that the extraneous cognitive load can’t moderate the effect of emotional design on the learners’ emotion and learning achievements in multimedia learning.(2)Emotional design and intrinsic cognitive load have no interaction on learning motivation and gaze patterns,and there is interaction between positive emotion and academic performance: when the intrinsic cognitive load level is low,positive emotions are induced.The induced positive emotions improve academic performance.This phenomenon was not observed at high cognitive load levels.It shows that reducing the intrinsic cognitive load can make emotional design promote the learning results through the induced positive emotions.(3)Emotional design and germane cognitive loads do not interact with learners’ emotions,learning motivation,fixation time,and learning results,but the two have an interactive effect on the numbers of fixation: when the germane cognitive load is low,in the emotional design group,the numbers of fixation on learning priorities was significantly more than in the neutral design group;when the germane cognitive load was higher,the results were opposite.It shows that when the cognitive load is low,the emotional design element can attract the learner’s attention;and when the germane cognitive load is high,the emotional design can enable the learner to perform more focused information processing.