Do concreteness fading and guidance fading aid learning from perceptually rich visualizations? Changes in style lead to more cognitive load and interfere with learning

Perceptually rich visualizations can overburden learners with too many details. As some learning tasks depend on realism and details, techniques that facilitate the cognitive processing of such visualizations are sought after. Concreteness fading has been proposed as an instructional method in which learners are first presented with a detailed visualization that is later replaced with a schematic version. A second technique that is thought to help learners is guidance fading, in which tasks get successively more difficult. In the first experiment (n = 125), fading the concreteness of an anatomical visualization, however, had a negative effect on learning, while using guidance fading during testing (realized by increasing the difficulty of the tests over time) had no effect. The second experiment (n = 107) was conducted to assess whether guidance fading implemented by first showing a complex model with color cues and later removing these hints can foster learning. The study revealed that this form of guidance fading had no effect on learning. The results have implications for the design of instructional visualizations and animations as they outline how changing the style of a visualization can interfere with building mental models. Based on the findings, educators should carefully consider whether they need to show visualizations that differ in their visual style in quick succession during a lecture or in an animation.