Sequential and Simultaneous Presentations of Information III. Why there is a difference

Mats Lind

Sequential and Simultaneous Presentations of Information III. Why there is a difference, Mats Lind, Report no. 18 from Uppsala University Center for Human-Computer Studies, Uppsala, Sweden.

Abstract

In decision making different presentations of relevant data may influence how quickly a correct decision is made. One way in which presentations of data can vary is whether the relevant data are available simultaneously or sequentially to the decision maker. In a previously reported experiment this presentation factor was shown to be important, in summary the results showed that, in a chosen task, the simultaneous presentation lead to substantially shorter decision times and that this effect could not be explained by the delays usually present in computer-based sequential presentations nor by the inherent property of sequential presentations to leave the spatial relations between different pieces of information undefined. Furthermore, the effect does not diminish with extensive amounts of practise. The present study investigates if the effect can be found using a very different task and examines two possible explanations for the effect. The superiority of the simultaneous presentation over the sequential one was once again found, also, the size of this effect was found to co-vary with the amount of memory load imposed by the decision making task. thus the hypothesis that the effect is due to an interference in working memory between information used for solving making the decision and information used for controlling the Human-Computer Interface cannot be rejected and it is therefore put forward as an explanation for the effect. There was no influence on the size of the effect whether the information was presented numerically or graphically.