| Massive changes are occurring in society regarding the delivery of information to individuals and the way individuals process this information. These changes happen at work, at home, and in schools; the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) are changing people’s working lives, leisure time, work settings, and educational environments. Multimedia on the Internet, but also as stand-alone applications, such as games on CD-ROM, are everywhere. It is important for the functioning of individuals and groups to have insight into these developments and consequences. For instance, the integration of many functions into one computer system can be very confusing. This applies on an individual level but also on an organizational level. It is now possible to work, follow the news, read serious information, relax, be amused, diverted, and so on using a PC, almost at the same time. What do all these changes imply?
All these changes and their consequences have traditionally been investigated largely within the domain of sociology, semiotics, mass communication, and so on. Detailed discussions from within cognitive psychology have been lacking. The purpose of this volume is to remedy this lack. In other words, the focus of this book is on the cognitive effects of the modern, digital environment on individuals. But besides that, even more important is the question of what conditions we can stipulate for adequately processing information in multimedia environments. For instance: What are the cognitive conditions of human beings in view of the integration of text, images, sound (speech), and data as frequently is the case within multimedia? It is also instructive to think about the consequences for human cognition of the large databases that are now available in principle. How can we handle so much information? The problem for human beings becomes more of a metacognitive nature than a classical cognitive one (Goldman, 1996). That is, knowledge management and strategies that people have to employ are getting more important than being able to store large amounts of data into one’s memory. Consequently, tasks and their related work flow can drastically change our normal way of working because of increased digitization. Another issue concerns the question of whether hypermedia, with the ability to crosslink text documents do effectively assist in the construction and updating of mental models. Further issues are the role of working memory with multimedia information processing (Mayer & Moreno, 1998); or what we can say about the role of computer games (on CD-ROM or Internet) on the cognition and emotion of individuals, and so on. |