Ruairí O'Sullivan is a student who followed the technology-path in BSc Applied Psychology. From Wexford, he grew up with a huge interest in technology, leading to being a member of the CoderDojo in his local area. Ruairí is a practiced teacher in Taekwondo and a musician, with a keen interest in music and games on psychology. He took part in the 2023 Enactus competition where the IADT team were working to destigmatize not having stationary and such in the classroom. Post-graduation, he aims to work in a HR style position or with technology.
This study had a quasi-experimental design, with participants brought into a computer lab one at a time to take part. Each participant was sat at a computer and shown a video before being asked to fill out a questionnaire asking if they had seen various items within the video. These questions could all be answered yes, no or I don’t know.
Each participant was placed into one of four groups. Single video stimulus with the primary video stimulus placed at the top or at the bottom of the screen, and Dual video stimulus with the primary video stimulus placed at the top or at the bottom of the screen.
This study investigated the effect of adding a second video to a screen on the amount of information gleaned from the video. This was done based on the current state of entertainment, where short-form social media videos are forever being shown in this fashion. It is thought by many people around the world that this sort of content is a leading factor in the lack of an attention span that is seen in the younger generations. The aspects that were being tested were the location of the main video, at the top or bottom of the screen, whether there were one or two videos and gaze data from a Tobii eyetracker to find out where participants were looking.
This study investigated three research questions. The first research question looked at if there was a difference in responses to the questionnaire based on the grouping. There were three Analyses of Variables run to test against the number of stimuli, the main stimulus position and an interaction effect between the two. No significant difference was found for these when compared against accurate response rate, inaccurate response rate or a score calculated from the two.
Research Question 2 looked at if there would be differences in fixation on the main video based on video location and number of videos. It was found that there was a significant difference when participants had one video instead of two, but no significance was found in video location.
Thirdly, a correlation between fixation and response accuracy was tested with a Pearson’s correlation. There was no significant correlation found in the results.
Investigating the Effect of Multiple Visual Stimuli on the Short-term Intake of Information