The Effect Of Audiovisual Information On Advice Taking: The Role Of Cognitive Load And Time Pressure

In recent years,university students in China have been under enormous employment pressure and many graduates have to rely on the guidance of others when it comes to career choices because they lack the necessary expertise.Advice taking is the process by which decision makers refer to the opinions of others and ultimately make the best decision.Little research has been done to explore how advice information in career decision-making is presented under the visual and auditory channels and the differences between the two in terms of different sensory channels of information.This study will investigate the effect of different channels of information on the taking of advice in career decision-making,as well as the differences in the level of advice taking in the audio-visual channel under the effects of time pressure and cognitive load,respectively.In order to examine the extent to which advice information in different channels influences the taking of advice in career decision-making,the study uses the decision-maker-adviser paradigm to compare the final values of the extent of advice taking in different channels of information based on the value of advice taking.In addition,the study further introduces the role of external factors,i.e.time pressure,based on the cognitive resource theory,as well as the study of different cognitive load levels,using the number of suggestions as a basis for rating different cognitive load levels.Two studies were designed for this study.Study 1 explored the influence of audio-visual channel information on the taking of advice in career decision-making with and without time pressure.Experiment 1 was designed to examine the effect of audio-visual channel information on the taking of advice in career decision-making,with the independent variable being audio-visual information.Experiment 2,based on Experiment 1,further investigated the average decision time of the subjects in the different sensory channels,and further explored the effect of audiovisual information on the taking of advice in career decision-making with and without time pressure.The results found that there was no significant difference in the extent to which audio-visual information had an effect on the taking of advice in career decision-making,indicating that the different sensory channel information in time pressure had no effect on the taking of advice in career decision-making.In order to examine whether audiovisual information has an effect on the degree of advice taking in career decision-making among the cognitive resources of the subjects,Study 1 found that different sensory channel information has a significant difference on the taking of advice in career decision-making.Therefore,Study 2 investigated the effect of audiovisual information on the taking of advice in career decision-making based on different levels of cognitive load and time pressure.Two experiments were designed for this study,Experiment 3 examined the effect of audiovisual information on the taking of advice in career decision-making based on different levels of cognitive load by treating advice information with a number of three suggestions as a high cognitive load and advice information with a number of one suggestion as a low cognitive load.The results found that the main effect of audiovisual information and cognitive load was not significant,while the interaction between audiovisual information and cognitive load was significant.Further simple effect analysis found that the simple effect of different levels of cognitive load under visual information was significant,which indicated that visual information in high cognitive load had a significant difference on the degree of advice taking in career decision making.Experiment 4 further explored the effects of audiovisual information on advice taking in career decision-making based on time pressure and cognitive load based on Experiment3.The results showed that there was an interaction between audiovisual information,time pressure and different levels of cognitive load,indicating that audiovisual information had a significant effect on the taking of advice in career decision-making under time pressure and cognitive load.This study examined the effect of audiovisual information on the taking of advice in career decision-making through the manipulation of time pressure and different levels of cognitive load.Audiovisual information had a significant effect on the taking of advice in career decision-making,and the findings have implications for university students when referring to information on the advice of others when making career decisions,which can be made by the type of advice information presented and the amount of advice provided for the final career decision.