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- Projects
- Attentional Processes
- Event Models
- Knowledge Acquisition by Means of Interactive Educational Films
- knowledge&museum: archive – exhibit – evidence
- Mixed Media in Television Documentaries
- Spatial Online-Processing of Dynamic Scenes
- The significance of "learning episodes" for learning in museums
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Cybermedia Lab
In recent years so called cybermedia have become more and more important concerning the area of education. Such media communicate their contents by presenting scenes in a graphical, three-dimensional form. Examples are virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), computer games, interactive videos, and hypervideos. All these provide learners with realistic, activity-oriented opportunities for perception and experience. Therefore, cybermedia are used for instance at schools, especially in history, geography, or biology lessons. But also numerous informal and non-institutionalized learning settings benefit from the advantages of cybermedia, such as science films and documentaries on television, as well as exhibitions or museums. Although cybermedia are characterized by a high degree of realism, their instructional possibilities go far beyond a mere simulation of reality. One of the essential challenges of designing cybermedia is how they can activate learners to a reflected and elaborated examination of the learning matters in order to improve knowledge acquisition.
Optimizing Experience
The focus of this group lies on the examination of the perception and cognitive processing of dynamic scenes. In daily activity everybody is confronted or surrounded by dynamics, like road traffic or sports events. Everyone watches such events on TV, in edited films, or in the internet, too. In contrast to real life, these media offer a lot of different ways of editing and presenting dynamic events; a complex mechanical device, for example, can be presented in different speeds. In our research we now examine the question if such manipulations have any consequences for the cognitive processing of dynamic scenes. And if so, if there are any conditions which offer possibilities of presenting dynamic scenes in an optimized way. Such conditions which are "better than reality" should have consequences for basic cognitive mechanisms like recognition, tracking or learning.
Competence and Elaboration within Cybermedia
It is often assumed that audiovisual media are processed more passively as for example printed texts. However, empirical results do not express this assumption clearly (Wetzel, Radtke & Stern, 1994). The group Competence and Elaboration within Cybermedia examines cognitive processes in the area of audiovisual media (film, video). On the one hand inference processes and their role for knowledge acquisition on the part of the recipient are analysed. On the other hand, navigation possibilities of interactive videos are used to promote a more elaborated cognitive processing of the film content. The goal of the group is to review the assumption of the passive reception attitude regarding audiovisual media and to develop measures that foster a more active reception attitude.
Mixed Media
The Mixed Media group deals with the experience and cognitive processing of innovative, hybrid forms of presentation. These include the mix of different formats such as factual and fictional, respectively social, contents, the combination of different genres like narration and exposition as well as the mix of object and medium. You can find these combinations for example in museums and television documentaries.