Multimedia recipe reading: Predicting learning outcomes and diagnosing cooking interest using eye-tracking measures

This study aimed to explore the relationships between students' visual behaviors and learning outcomes, and between visual behaviors and prior cooking interest in multimedia recipe learning. An eye-tracking experiment, including pretest, recall test, and retention test, was conducted with a sample of 29 volunteer hospitality majors in Taiwan. The multimedia recipe included a static page showing the ingredients in a text-and-picture representation and a dynamic page showing the knife skills in a text-and-video representation. Total reading time, total fixation duration, number of fixations and inter-scanning count were used to explore the students' visual attention distributions among the different representation elements and their visual strategies for learning the recipe. The results showed that all students paid more visual attention to the text than to the picture information for the static recipe, and paid more visual attention to the video than to the text on the dynamic page. In addition, the visual attention paid to the text on the dynamic page was negatively correlated with the retention of the episodic knowledge of knife skills. In contrast, the visual attention paid to the text on the static ingredient page was positively correlated with students' prior cooking interest. Finally, the inter-scanning count between text and video on the dynamic page was the best index to negatively predict students' learning retention. Total fixation duration on the text information on the static page was the best index to positively predict students' prior cooking interest. Future studies and applications are discussed.