Cueing animations: Dynamic signaling aids information extraction and comprehension

The effectiveness of animations containing two novel forms of animation cueing that target relations between event units rather than individual entities was compared with that of animations containing conventional entity-based cueing or no cues. These relational event unit cues (progressive path and local coordinated cues) were specifically designed to support key learning processes posited by the Animation Processing Model (Lowe & Boucheix, 2008). Four groups of undergraduates (N ¼ 84) studied a usercontrollable animation of a piano mechanism and then were assessed for mental model quality (via a written comprehension test) and knowledge of the mechanism’s dynamics (via a novel non-verbal …