User's Cognitive Style Research Articles

Effect of information load and cognitive style on cognitive load of visualized dashboards for construction-related activities

A well-designed visualized dashboard could provide intuitive information to construction project managers for effective decision-making. However, the impact of information load of dashboards on cognitive load has rarely been investigated. The roles of user cognitive styles were also ignored. This study examined the effect of dashboard information load and user cognitive style on cognitive load when using dashboards in the construction industry. We designed a visual search experiment with five information load levels. Fifty-six participants, divided into field-dependent (FD) and field-independent (FI) groups, participated in the experiment. The results showed that the FI group had a lower cognitive load and was more efficient than the FD group. The effect of information load on cognitive load followed a piecewise linear correlation with the two prominent knots. The findings underscore the importance of assessing the information load and providing psychological underpinnings for cognitive-fit dashboard design for smart construction management.

Predictive Analytics of User Cognitive Styles in Online Shopping.

Predictive Analytics of User Cognitive Styles in Online Shopping.

Predictive analytics of user cognitive styles in online shopping

Predictive analytics of user cognitive styles in online shopping

Cognitive Style and Information Visualization—Modeling Users Through Eye Gaze Data

Information visualizations can be regarded as one of the most powerful cognitive tools to significantly amplify human cognition. However, traditional information visualization systems have been designed in a manner that does not consider individual user differences, even though human cognitive abilities and styles have been shown to differ significantly. In order to address this research gap, novel adaptive systems need to be developed that are able to (1) infer individual user characteristics and (2) provide an adaptation mechanism to personalize the system to the inferred characteristic. This paper presents a first step toward this goal by investigating the extent to which a user's cognitive style can be inferred from their behavior with an information visualization system. In particular, this paper presents a series of experiments that utilize features calculated from user eye gaze data in order to infer a user's cognitive style. Several different data and feature sets are presented, and results overall show that a user's eye gaze data can be used successfully to infer a user's cognitive style during information visualization usage.

Towards Adaptive Information Visualization - A Study of Information Visualization Aids and the Role of User Cognitive Style.

Information Visualization systems have traditionally followed a one-size-fits-all model, whereby the same visualization is shown to each user, without taking into consideration an individual user's preferences, abilities, or context. By contrast, given the considerable cognitive effort involved in using Information Visualizations, this paper investigates the effect of an individual user's cognitive style on Information Visualization performance. In addition, this paper studies several interactive “visualization aids” (i.e., interactive overlays that can aid in visualization comprehension), as well as the effect of cognitive style on aid choices and preferences. The results from a user study show that cognitive style plays a significant role when performing tasks with Information Visualizations in general, and that there are clear differences in terms of individual aid choices and preferences. These findings also provide motivation for the development of adaptive and personalized Information Visualization systems that could better assist users according to their individual cognitive style.

User choice of interactive data visualization format: The effects of cognitive style and spatial ability

Interactive data visualization has become an important tool for business executives in monitoring key performance indicators, analyzing business process data, and managing individual and organizational performances. One of the key features in interactive data visualization is that users have direct control over how information is presented during the decision-making process. Few studies have examined how users choose visualization formats in such an environment. In this study, we investigate how cognitive style, spatial ability, and task difficulty affect the preference and choice of visualization formats and how the chosen visualization format in turn affects decision accuracy and confidence. Our results show that the choice of visualization format is affected by a user's cognitive style and task difficulty. While decision performances in accuracy and confidence are affected by task difficulty, spatial ability, and visualization format, they are largely not affected by the interactions between visualization format and cognitive style, spatial ability, and task difficulty.

Cognitive Information Mapping Model for Web-based Search

The tremendous growth in the Web-based activities of the user has led to the explosion of information on the Web. Searching the relevant information from such a massive repository poses several challenges for the user involved in the query-based search process. Search engines form the backbone for Web-based information retrieval. They present the Web pages (resources) based on the page relevancy to the query, popularity of the page and content. They disregard the user context and emotions experienced by the user during the search process. A personalised search support is desired to reduce cognitive burden on the user. Thus, it would be interesting and useful to provide search suggestions based on the context and emotions. In this paper, a Cognitive Information Mapping Model (CIMM) has been proposed to assist the user during the search process. This model maps the information about the user's cognitive style including Web-based activities and emotions. It provides suggestions based on queries searched, resources accessed and emotions experienced during the search. CIMM also guides the user to identify resources based on their utilisation, thus constraining the user from repeated access of similar resources and those tagged as useless.

Evaluation of the Impact of User-Cognitive Styles on the Assessment of Text Summarization

Text summarization techniques have been found to be effective with regard to helping users find relevant information faster. The effectiveness and efficiency of a user's performance in an information-seeking task can greatly be improved if he/she needs to only look at a summary that includes the relevant information presented in his/her preferred manner. On the other hand, if the main idea is misrepresented and/or omitted altogether from a summary, it may take users more time to solve a target problem or, even worse, lead users to make incorrect decisions. There is an important need to design a personalized text summarization system that takes into account both what a user is currently interested in and how a user perceives information. The latter factor is referred to as a user's cognitive styles. Although there are some existing approaches that have employed a user's interests to help in the design of a personalized text summarization system, there has been inadequate focus on exploring cognitive styles. This paper aims at studying the impact of a user's cognitive styles when assessing multidocument summaries. In particular, we choose two dimensions of a user's cognitive style - the analytic/wholist and verbal/imagery dimensions - and study their impacts on how a user assesses a summary that was generated from a set of documents. In particular, the type of a document set refers to whether the set's content is loosely or closely related. We use a document set type to explore if there are any differences in the users' assessments of summaries that were generated from sets of different types. The results of this paper show that different users have different assessments with regard to information coverage and the way that information is presented in both loosely and closely related document sets. In addition, we found that the coherency ratings that were given to summaries from the two types of document sets were significantly different between the analytic and wholist groups. This result leads us to investigate the impact of a user's cognitive styles and the following two factors that directly relate to the coherence of a summary: 1) graph entropy and 2) the percentage of stand-alone concepts. We found that these two factors and a user's cognitive styles affect a user's ratings on the coherency of a summary.

Cognitive style and personality: impact on multimedia perception

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between cognitive style, user personality and perceived multimedia quality.Design/methodology/approachThis paper used Cognitive Style Analysis and an adapted Myers‐Briggs questionnaire to assess cognitive style and user personality respectively. It also used an adapted Quality of Perception metric to assess user‐perceived multimedia quality.FindingsThe research shows that personality type and user cognitive style affects information assimilation, self‐perceived achievement and student level of confidence.Practical implicationsThis work suggests a number of practical recommendations to support the consideration of personality and cognitive style in preparation of educational multimedia material.Originality/valueThis paper provides consideration of personality and cognitive style, and the impact that they have on user multimedia perception.

Field Dependency and the Sense of Object-Presence in Haptic Virtual Environments

Virtual environment (VE) users often report having a sense of being present in the virtual place or a sense that the virtual object is present in their environment. This sense of presence depends on both the technological fidelity (e.g., in graphics, haptics) and the users' cognitive/ personality characteristics. This study examined the correlation between user's cognitive style on the field-dependency dimension and the level of object-presence they reported in a haptic VE. Results indicated that field-independent individuals reported higher presence ratings compared to field-dependent participants. We hypothesize that field-independents' advantage in reorganizing the perceptual field and constructing it according to their previously acquired internal knowledge enables them to cognitively reconstruct the VE experience more efficiently by selectively attending only to the relevant cues and by filling in the gap of missing information with their previous knowledge and creative imagination. This active and creative cognitive process may be behind the enhanced sense of presence. In addition, we raise a possible linkage between field dependency, the sense of presence, and simulator sickness phenomenon.

The Effects of Aesthetics and Cognitive, Style on Perceived Usability

This study assesses the influence of product aesthetics and user cognitive style on perceived usability. It also attempts to determine whether the two effects are independent of one another. It was predicted that the strength of the relationship between aesthetics and perceived usability depends on individual differences in cognitive style. To test this hypothesis, two functionally identical but aesthetically different computer applications were created. Participants took a test that assessed their cognitive styles, interacted with one of the two applications, and subjectively rated the application on both usability and aesthetic quality. Results showed a significant relationship between perceived aesthetic quality and perceived usability, and also between perceived aesthetic quality and objectively-defined aesthetic quality. No relationship was observed between objectively-defined aesthetic quality and perceived usability or between cognitive style and perceived usability, and no interaction between aesthetics and cognitive style was evident.

Perceived quality of multimedia educational content: A cognitive style approach

Cognitive styles influence the way how humans process information, with previous research demonstrating that they have significant effects on student learning in multimedia environments. On the other hand, the perceptual quality of the human multimedia experience is notoriously difficult to measure. In this paper, we report the results of an empirical study, which investigated the relationship between user cognitive styles and perceptual multimedia quality, in which users had the possibility to specify their desired Quality of Service settings -- in terms of frame rates and color depth. Results show that whilst color choice is impacted by a participant's cognitive style, such Quality of Service parameters do not significantly affect perceived multimedia quality, and that users do not necessarily choose optimum presentation settings to enhance their perceived enjoyment and assimilation of multimedia informational content.

User Performance with Audio: The effect of subjects' cognitive styles

This work is concerned with the issue of user performance with audio interfaces. We examine how people perform when assigned with simple purely audio tasks. We define 'user performance' as the ratio of correct score divided by the time to complete the task. A test was devised to examine how the user cognitive style classification is related to user performance when dealing with audio tasks. Performance was significantly different between all tasks except for two cases. Subjects performed best where the level of cognitive demands placed on them were low and prefer tasks that use 'Speech', rather than 'Non-Speech'. Cognitive style was not found to be a significant factor influencing performance where all subjects performed well, but subjects' Verbal-Imagery classification was found to be a significant factor for the more complex tasks.

Effective video screen displays

Cues are often added to video screen presentations to help users focus on the most important sections of text. The effectiveness of cues is usually thought to be inherent within the characteristics of the cues. In this case, an experiment was conducted to determine whether the effectiveness of two cuing techniques is dependent upon a user's cognitive style. The Thurstone and Jeffrey Closure Flexibility Test was used to identify 75 subjects high in the field independent cognitive style and another 75 high in the field dependent cognitive style. Twenty-five members of each cognitive style group were exposed to one of the cuing techniques; either underlining or highlighting. A control group was exposed to no cue. The cues were used to called attention to important words and phrases appearing in a tutorial that explained how to use the Grolier Electronic Encyclopedia in CD-ROM format. The dependent variable was time taken to finish the tutorial.Results were evaluated according to an analysis of variance and a t-test. Cognitive style was demonstrated to be a determining factor with field independent subjects finishing the tutorial significantly faster than the field dependent subjects.The faster performance of field independent subjects while interacting with a video screen display was attributed to the fact that they tend to perceive objects more analytically and to separate objects from their embedded backgrounds, as opposed to field dependent subjects who tend to perceive objects in a global context.

Cognitive Style as a Basis for MIS and DSS Designs: Much ADO About Nothing?

It is commonly believed that the user's cognitive style should be considered in the design of Management Information Systems and Decision Support Systems. In contrast, an examination of the literature and a consideration of some of the broader issues involved in MIS and DSS design lead to the conclusions that: (1) the currently available literature on cognitive style is an unsatisfactory basis for deriving operational design guidelines, and (2) further cognitive style research is unlikely to provide a satisfactory body of knowledge from which to derive such guidelines. The article presents six specific bases for these two conclusions. From a manager's pespective, the outcome of the study is a suggestion: maintain a healthy skepticism if it is suggested that paper and pencil assessments of the user's cognitive style should be used as a basis for MIS or DSS designs. From a researcher's viewpoint, the study raises two questions: (1) If our research interest is MIS and DSS design, does it seem that further research in cognitive style is a wise allocation of our research resources? (2) If our research interest is cognitive style, does it seem that the use of cognitive style as a basis for MIS and DSS designs will become an important application area?