Are Interactive Multimedia Presentations Better Than Static Mixed-Mode Presentations?
N. H. Narayanan & M. Hegarty Mixed-mode representations comprising verbal explanations illustrated with diagrams have long been used to communicate information. With the advent of multimedia, such representations have become interactive and dynamic, and have migrated from paper to the computer. The conventional wisdom is that computer-based multimedia is better than paper-based representations. However, the question of whether the communicative power of mixed-mode representations stem from their careful design to match cognitive processes involved in comprehension, such as mental animation, or from their interactive and animated nature, has never been investigated. This is an important issue since, if effectiveness of external representations mainly arises from their match with comprehension processes, paper-based representations should perform as well as computer-based ones. On the other hand, if interactivity and explicit animation significantly increase comprehension, computer-based
