Contrastiveness in the context of action demonstration: an eye-tracking study on its effects on action perception and action recall

<p>The study investigates two different ways of guiding the addressee of an explanation - an explainee, through action demonstration: contrastive and non-contrastive. Their effect was tested on attention to specific action elements (goal) as well as on event memory. In an eye-tracking experiment, participants were shown different motion videos that were either contrastive or non-contrastive with respect to the segments of movement presentation. Given that everyday action demonstration is often multimodal, the stimuli were created with re- spect to their visual and verbal presentation. For visual presentation, a video combined two movements in a contrastive (e.g., Up-motion following a Down-motion) or non-contrastive way (e.g., two Up-motions following each other). For verbal presentation, each video was combined with a sequence of instruction descriptions in the form of negative (i.e., contrastive) or assertive (i.e., non-contrastive) guidance. It was found that a) attention to the event goal increased for this condition in the later time window, and b) participants’ recall of the event was facilitated when a visually contrastive motion was combined with a verbal contrast.</p>