Potentials of neurophysiological measures for research on instructional design: The case of decorative pictures.

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Decorative pictures (DP) are often added to instructional materials like texts to increase students' interest in the task. However, DP have resulted in mixed effects on learning outcomes with potential reasons still matter of debate. Increased cognitive load (CL) and attentional distraction have been hypothesized as reasons for detrimental effects of DP.The current research proposal aims at systematically studying factors of how DP influence CL and attention during learning, thus identifying when and how DP result in beneficial or detrimental effects on task performance and learning. Suitable (neuro-) physiological process measures like the frontal EEG theta and parietal alpha frequency band power, the frontal alpha asymmetry, and pupil dilation will be used to assess effects of DP during task performance and learning. In a series of four studies (S1-S4) different features of DP will be experimentally manipulated in the context of learning tasks (reading comprehension) and working memory (WM) tasks (n-back WM tasks).Potentially, the emotional content of the DP, the amount of content-congruity between DP and core task materials, and the difficulty of the core task materials (i.e. the intrinsic CL) may be reasons for the mixed results of DP that have been reported. In Study S1 the general effects of present, partly present or absent DP on CL (as assessed by the physiological measures) and task performance will be studied. A dissociation between CL and task performance is expected in case of DP positively altering subjects' motivation. In S2 and S3 the emotional content of the DP will be manipulated (negative, neutral, positive valence), thus allowing to study the effects of emotional aspects of DP on attentional capturing (i.e. distraction) but also on motivation. Finally S4 addresses the question, how the content-congruity between DP and core task materials affects CL and task outcomes. In all studies the task difficulty will be manipulated (i.e. intrinsic CL), thus allowing to systematically assess the potential mutual effects of intrinsic CL induced by the core task materials and extraneous CL induced by DP. As all DP-manipulations are conducted in complex learning tasks as well as in basic, highly controlled WM tasks, potentially confounding factors on the physiological measures can be ruled out and the results may be generalized and attributed specifically to WM performance.Taken together, we expect that the proposed studies will substantially increase the understanding of the disparate effects of DP on task performance and learning and will underline the potentials of (neuro-) physiological measures for research on instructional design.