An eye-tracking study of cueing effects in multimedia learning

In order to assess the effects of attention guiding during the learning of a multimedia document comprising static diagrams and spoken explanations, we recorded the eye movements of participants exposed to a digital learning environment either with or without visual cues. As predicted, the presence of cues (an item changing colour when it was verbally evoked) limited the amount of time spent fixating the less relevant areas of the interface, thereby allowing for more synchronized processing of the visual and auditory sources of information that referred to each other, and better learning (though not deep comprehension) of the signalled information. These results suggest that visual cues can direct attention to the right areas of the screen at the right time, thereby promoting learning.