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Summarizing digital documents: effects of alternate or simultaneous window display
Author(s) -
Olive Thierry,
Rouet JeanFrançois,
François Emmanuelle,
Zampa Virginie
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
applied cognitive psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.719
H-Index - 100
eISSN - 1099-0720
pISSN - 0888-4080
DOI - 10.1002/acp.1380
Subject(s) - copying , window (computing) , computer science , visibility , reading (process) , representation (politics) , information retrieval , quality (philosophy) , multimedia , human–computer interaction , computer graphics (images) , world wide web , linguistics , philosophy , physics , optics , epistemology , politics , political science , law
We investigated the effect of window visibility on the computer‐based summarizing of digital documents. Two experiments studied the impact of the simultaneous or alternate display of the windows containing the notepad and source documents. In Experiment 1, the participants were asked to summarize the content of the source documents. In Experiment 2, they were required to copy out sections of the source documents. The results showed that in the alternate condition, the participants performed fewer reading and writing cycles than in the simultaneous condition. Furthermore, in the alternate condition, the writing episodes were both more numerous and more effortful, while quality of the summaries produced using the copying strategy was also affected. These experiments highlight the need for writers to be able to navigate freely and easily between the windows so that they can construct an overall mental representation of their summaries. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.