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Excepts from Curt A. Monash's comment, posted at 12:54 on  7 Jul 95:

> 3.  Text and still images are, for most purposes, faster to consume
> than video and sound.  Why?  Because they're easier to "skim". 

There's actually a fairly protracted debate over this among 
cognitive and Gestalt researchers. Simple images and sounds are in 
almost all cases faster to absorb, more memorable and in some cases 
more believable. Complex images (I know of no research on complex
sounds) seem to present problems. 

If complex images (particularly unfamiliar things) are created in a way that 
enables rapid decoding into decipherable component parts, they may still be 
effective. Moreover, as you alluded, they arrive over an almost 
subconscious bandwidth, communicating even when the audience is not 
consciously mining them for information. And people tend to find 
them more enjoyable. 

However, particularly when dealing with full video, the additional 
numbers drawn by enjoyability and subconscious exposure tend to be offset 
by the greater salience readers give to text (they have invested of 
their time in reading it) and the difficulty of quickly decoding complex 
images. 

In the end, then, each modality seems to perform equally well.

The lesson? If you're bright enough to design with simplicity and 
clear clues as to meaning, you might be able to take advantage of the 
power of the visual without incurring its accompanying drawbacks. 

The same probably is true of aural material, but this goes beyond my 
research.

I attribute this in a theoretical sense to an information theory 
concept known as Markov chaining.
______________________________________________________________________

Eric K. Meyer          NEWSLINK ASSOCIATES      largest free news list                             
meyer@newslink.org    research & consulting    http://www.newslink.org
______________________________________________________________________

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