Abstract
The twenty-first Century is the era of globalization of information and technology, as technology proceeds continuous progressing, various kinds of technical products have become parts of our daily life. The widely spread of wireless network, combined with technical products, have not only made information become far more available, but also changed the presentation type of information. The same information may be expressed with various kinds of media, including texts, pictures, videos, animations and audio. Multimedia combines these types of information and can be expressed through technical products. According to the definition of digital content industry, which was defined by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, digital content industry includes digital learning, digital platforms, multimedia tools and Ebooks. From the statistic data provided by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the industry has been growing since 2003, which shows the significant progress in the past decade. Therefore the use and design of multimedia is one of the main concerns of presenting information. Compared to simple text, multimedia information can be more interesting and attractive to readers, and further raises readers’ willingness of reading the information. However, several researches have pointed out that higher interestingness of the information may not necessarily relate to better learning outcomes. If the media selected fail to express the key concept of the learning material, learners’ memory and comprehension would be affected. This research combined electronic text and image to be one multimedia reading material which was used as research material, trying to analyze readers’ visual behavior and memory of image content. Using eye tracker to record readers’ reading behavior, five indices are selected to observe readers’ visual behavior, and they are number of fixation points, percentage of fixation points, total fixation time, percentage of total fixation time, saccades between text and image. Memory of image content is accessed by questionnaire. Combining the results of memory of image content and eye-tracking indices, this research tries to understand the impact of multimedia reading materials with different relevance level of text and image on readers’ visual behavior and memory of image content. Previous researches have regarded text as the main topic, the comprehension and recall were about the meaning of text part of the material. While in this study, images would then be treated as the main material, and readers’ memory of the image detail would be the main concern. From the results of the experiment, participants assigned to high relevance group scored higher than participants assigned to low relevance group, which explains the effect of multimedia materials with different level of relevance. Observations from the eye tracking data revealed that all participants had correct saccades from text part to corresponding image. Combining the results of participants’ visual path with their score, this analysis revealed that participants’ scores were highly related to the level of relevance and visual path. As for the related suggestions, future research could establish a specific indicator to support absolute judgement of relevance level between text and image, widen the range of participants’ age and access participants’ subjective feelings or attitudes toward multimedia reading material with different level of relevance with interviews, expecting to spread information through multimedia in a more effective way and provide suggestions for designing information types and multimedia learning materials.