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You are here: Home / Cognition / How Visual Clarity Affects Learning

How Visual Clarity Affects Learning

by Connie Malamed

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How do you react when you see a very complex diagram or a screen of dense text? Do you want to dive right in and conquer it? Or do you silently groan and reluctantly wade your way through it, turning away if it becomes too difficult?

Processing Fluency

If you’re like most people, you’ll experience negative feelings toward obscure visual or textual information. You’ll think the content isn’t valuable or worth your effort. It’s all related to processing fluency, which refers to the ease with which a person processes information.

The visual clarity of your content affects the perceptual aspect of processing fluency—impacting how easy it is to use and comprehend. Much fascinating research has been done to better understand these effects, which should be of great interest to learning experience designers.

Is it easy to process?

Research shows that the ease with which information is internally processed affects a person’s judgment and decision making—whether it’s a screen design, a magazine article or a page in a textbook. In other words, people have positive feelings about visuals and verbiage when they are easy to perceive and process. Furthermore, people are more likely to experience aesthetic pleasure from something when processing is easy.

This has strong implications for learning, because of the impact positive or negative feelings have on motivation, comprehension and retention. Here are a few insightful examples from the research. Then draw your own conclusions.

Processing Fluency and LearningEasy to read = Easy to do

Want to learn a new exercise? Read the instructions on the right. Does the exercise at the top seem easy to follow? And does the exercise at the bottom seem difficult to do?

When study participants were given these easy-to-read instructions at the top, they thought the exercise wouldn’t take much effort and that they could fit it into their schedule.

When the exact same instructions were displayed in a less legible typeface (shown at the bottom), participants thought the exercise would be difficult to perform and would take almost twice as long to get through. (Song and Schwarz, 2008).

The high processing fluency of the instructions at the top carried over to the participants’ judgment of the exercise itself.

Incidental Factors Affect Emotions

Researchers found similar results in a study using recipes. The easy-to-read recipe was thought to take less time and skill to prepare—it was something participants could handle by themselves. On the other hand, the exact same recipe in a less legible format influenced participants to think the recipe would require more skill and time to prepare. They were less willing to think they could manage it themselves.

The bottom line is that incidental factors beneath the level of awareness affect the emotional experience of the viewer. People may be aware of the experience of ease or difficulty, but are unaware of what causes these feelings.

Easy to Perceive = Must Be True

Now here’s one more. In another study, participants were provided both easy and difficult-to-read statements using color contrast as the variable. Subjects were more likely to consider the very legible statements (blue or red text on a white background) to be true than the statements that were difficult to read (light blue and yellow against a white background). (Reber and Schwarz, 1999). When people have an absence of knowledge about a topic, they must use other factors to evaluate whether statements are true.

Lessons for eLearning

What lessons can we glean from this research? I think it clearly points to the value and significance of effective visual design for creating positive learning experiences. In particular, visual clarity should be a guiding principle in any design. To achieve visual clarity, consider these findings from other research on processing fluency and aesthetics.

  • People prefer prototypical and familiar stimuli over highly unusual examples. What’s familiar is easier to process.
  • Symmetry is valued more than non-symmetry, particularly vertical symmetry.
  • High figure-ground contrast makes graphics clear and text legible.
  • Visual clarity creates an effortless experience, which is preferred over experiences that are highly effortful.
  • Less information is preferred over more information. (But we already knew that.)

What do you get from this research? How can you improve the visual clarity of your eLearning? Comment below.

References:
1. Song, H. & Schwarz, N. (2008). If it’s hard to read, it’s hard to do: Processing fluency affects effort prediction and motivation. Psychological Science, 19, 986–988.

2. Reber, R. & Schwarz, N. (1999). Effects of perceptual fluency on judgments of truth. Consciousness and Cognition, 8, 338–342.

3. Reber, R., Schwarz, N. & Winkielman, P. (2004). Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: Is beauty in the perceiver’s processing experience? Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8, 364–382.

Comments

  1. Philippe Packu says

    March 28, 2012 at 9:17 am

    Hi,
    I’ve just discovered your website and its very interesting articles from a peer’s tweet.

    I’ve just published an article demonstrating the importance of emotion and creativity in mind maps when learning and memorizing (http://www.drawmeanidea.com/2012/03/geography-mind-map-of-belgium.html).

    Philippe

  2. Connie Malamed says

    May 16, 2011 at 7:43 am

    Hi Ferdinand,
    The Gestalt theories of perception that you mention are fascinating and seem to play such an important role in understanding graphics, particularly abstract ones like graphs and charts. See this article: The Power of Visual Grouping. Thanks for your comment.
    Connie

  3. Ferdinand Arreguin says

    May 16, 2011 at 12:48 am

    How visual clarity affects learning,
    This information is very important for all teachers, instructors, and instructional designers to know.
    According to my text book Learning Theories and Instruction (Ormrod, Schunk, & Gredler, 2009) Information processing commence when our sight sense perceives a visual stimulus. Then the appropriate sensory obtain and holds this information in sensory form. It is here where the insight occurs, the process of transmission significance to a stimulus input. The sensory register transfer information to the short term memory.
    Gestalt theory and research showed that well-organized material is easier to learn and recall. Using that theory we can say that when letters are easy to read it is more likely that the learner can understand the material. As instructional designers we need to consider that iconic learners will benefit from our designs if we present materials that are easy to read and well organized.

  4. Connie Malamed says

    March 6, 2011 at 7:33 am

    Thanks for your generous comment, Sue. I’m glad you’ve found this useful for your students. I find processing fluency to be a pretty fascinating topic.

  5. Sue Andrews says

    March 5, 2011 at 10:37 pm

    Connie thank you for this insightful and clear post. I have recommended this article as one that my students must read. I teach courses in Technical Communication in the SFU Writing and Publishing Program http://www.sfu.ca/cstudies/techcomm/

    We try to teach our students how vital it is for design and write information that is easy to read and visually appealing. Your article encapsulates why this is so important.
    Thank you!
    Sue

  6. Connie Malamed says

    November 4, 2010 at 8:22 pm

    Hi John,
    Thanks for your informative comment. Yes, you really have to think about how the animation is going to end up. I often like to start at the end result, and work my way backwards or iterate back and forth while conceiving ideas.
    Best,
    Connie

  7. John says

    November 4, 2010 at 7:47 pm

    I couldn’t agree more. One of the key activities we have to engage in while developing interactive multimedia instruction, is coming up with logical visual organization schemes in order to avoid cognitive overload. for example, when producing narration driven e-learning, graphics animate on screen in sync with audio. By the time the narration is done and the graphics have finished building, you can often be left with a hodge podge of graphic content on screen, which may have made sense while it was coming on screen in time with the narration, but when viewed as a whole, or in its end state can be cognitively dissonant. This compared to applying an organization scheme that groups similar elements together, resulting in a more simple easy to understand macro level concept.

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