SELECTIVE ATTENTION PERFORMANCE CONTRIBUTED BY COGNITIVE STYLES AND USER INTERFACE DESIGNS

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study aims to find out what kind of interface design can contribute to better selective attention performance and, at the same time, how much of the effectiveness is caused by different cognitive styles. And hence, three types of display patterns (horizontal row, vertical column and centralized block) and three types of display locations (left and right, top and bottom, left and top), both on CRT display, were used to explore how the different interface designs affect users' selective attention performance. Then, nine cognitive styles, suggested by Riding [10], were also used to further analyze their effects on users' attention performance. The results discovered: 1) both the patterns and locations of display did affect the performance of selective attention; and 2) only Verbal-Imagery dimension had effect on selective attention performance at “left and right” display location while Wholist-Analytic dimension did not.

Keywords:

• cognitive style
• selective attention
• user interface design