Looking Across Instead of Back and Forth: How the Simultaneous Presentation of Multiple Animation Episodes Facilitates Learning

Many learning tasks require students to induce higher-order relationships from the learning material. Compare and contrast processes play a pivotal role in solving such inductive tasks. Different presentations of animation episodes offer affordances to students that can either impede or facilitate compare and contrast processes. While conventional behaviorally realistic animations typically present multiple episodes one after the other, i.e. sequentially, simultaneous presentation offers a feasible alternative. We investigated how the sequential and simultaneous presentation of multiple animation episodes affects students’ perceptual interrogation of the animation as well as their learning of higher-order relationships. Of the 60 students who participated in the experimental study, one half studied the animation episodes presented sequentially and the other half studied the same episodes presented simultaneously. The eye movements of eight participants from each group were recorded while they studied the animation episodes. The simultaneous presentation resulted in significantly more visual transitions between the episodes than the sequential version. Furthermore, significantly more bi-directional visual transitions occurred in case of the simultaneous presentation than for the sequential presentation. Learning of higher-order relationships was significantly more successful from simultaneously presented episodes than from sequentially presented episodes.