Cognitive integration and referential communication: Effects of information quality and quantity in message decoding

Abstract

Four experiments are reported in which respondents were presented with one or more written passages, describing the face of an actor who was portraying a particular emotional expression (e. g., surprise). After reading each message ensemble, the respondents attempted to select the appropriate target-referent from an array of 24 photographs showing the same actor in different emotional poses. The results indicated that performance was consistently affected by the quality of the message ensembles (as quantified by the percentage of relatively accurate descriptions in the set) and by the quantity of information that was available (the number of different descriptive passages in the set). When a message-set was expanded while its overall quality was reduced (by including more and more low-quality descriptions), performance deteriorated. Finally, there was no convincing evidence of information overload; despite substantial expansions in the size of the message-sets that ultimately included as many as 24 different passages, when the quality of the ensembles was held constant, performance did not decline.