Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The study investigates two different ways of guiding the addressee of an explanation - an explainee, through action demonstration: contrastive and non-contrastive. Their effect was tested on attention to specific action elements (goal) as well as on event memory. In an eye-tracking experiment, participants were shown different motion videos that were either contrastive or non-contrastive with respect to the segments of movement presentation. Given that everyday action demonstration is often multimodal, the stimuli were created with respect to their visual and verbal presentation. For visual presentation, a video combined two movements in a contrastive (e.g., Up-motion following a Down-motion) or non-contrastive way (e.g., two Up-motions following each other). For verbal presentation, each video was combined with a sequence of instruction descriptions in the form of negative (i.e., contrastive) or assertive (i.e., non-contrastive) guidance. It was found that a) attention to the event goal increased for this condition in the later time window, and b) participants’ recall of the event was facilitated when a visually contrastive motion was combined with a verbal contrast.