Temporal Contiguity Principle

Overview

“The temporal contiguity principle is that people learn more deeply from a multimedia message when corresponding animation and narration are presented simultaneously rather than successively.” (Mayer & Fiorella 2014). Mayer called the presentation of the picture and the picture commentary at the same time as "simultaneous presentation", and the separate presentation of the two at two different times as "successive presentation" (Mayer, 2009).

Theoretical Rationale： In the mode of synchronous presentation of information, speech and vision are simultaneously processed in different information processing channels to form verbal representations and visual representations respectively, which is beneficial for learners to combine the formed two representations in working memory, thereby establishing an internally coherent mental representation. When the corresponding parts of the narration and animation are separated in time, it is unlikely that learners will retain both in working memory at the same time due to the very limited capacity of either channel of working memory and the short duration of information stored in working memory. The learner's mental representation, therefore, the learner is less likely to make a mental connection between the verbal and visual representations. (Mayer, 2001).

Evidence

In Mayer's related research on applying the principle of temporal continuity, learners performed better on memory tests on three out of five tests when the corresponding parts of the animation and narration were presented simultaneously rather than sequentially. In eight out of the eight tests, learners performed better on transfer tests when the corresponding parts of the animation and narration were presented simultaneously rather than sequentially. The median effect size is d = 1.31. (Mayer, 2009)

Design Implications

Multimedia teaching uses media to make sentences and pictures co-present teaching information to promote learners' learning. However, simply presenting information using multiple modalities does not guarantee performance, especially when the limitations of human cognitive architecture are not considered (Sweller,1998, 2019). Therefore, when the principle of time continuity is applied to actual learning design, designers should follow this principle as much as possible to avoid the time gap between the display screen and oral narration being too large to bring the cognitive load to learners.

With the rapid development of education informatization, education informatization infrastructure facilitates the normalization of informatization teaching, multimedia teaching is deeply loved by teachers and students, and students also have more needs for extracurricular learning. It turns out that more and more teachers will record online courses, and many different types of teaching will also be presented in the form of videos and animations. For example, there are many free teaching videos on Youtube, regardless of the subject. A very common example is the video of cooking instructions. The pictures of the operation steps in the video and the narration of the explanation are always almost synchronous. Cooking teaching videos that follow the principle of time continuity can allow viewers to understand the operation steps and cooking methods more clearly, and are more friendly to novices. Also not to be overlooked is that many videos have feedback options that allow viewers to report errors when the narration is out of sync. This is also a reminder that video designers attach importance to the principle of time continuity.

Challenges

With regard to temporal continuity, how to determine the temporal limits of the principle is useful. For example, do the text and the image have to appear exactly at the same time, or can they be separated by a few seconds? According to Baggett and Ehrenfeucht (1983) and Baggett (1984), learners experience difficulty even when corresponding words and pictures are separated by a few seconds. So further research is needed to determine the time constraints for coordinating narration and animation in multimedia messages.

Although the design principle of time proximity multimedia teaching is the conclusion drawn by Meyer and his colleagues after many experiments, there are still some boundary conditions for the time proximity principle. When the verbal information and image information are short, even in the mode of sequential presentation of information, learners need to process the information of the picture and the explanation separately, which will not cause cognitive load to the learners. Or when learners themselves can control the rhythm or pace of learning, the effect of time proximity principle is not obvious, because students can watch repeatedly according to their own learning progress..