An Experimental Assessment of the Use of Cognitive and Affective Factors in Adaptive Educational Hypermedia

In order to assess the positive effect and validity of personalization on the basis of users´ cognitive and emotional characteristics, this study presents three subsequent experiments. The first experiment explores the relationship of cognitive style and users´ eye gaze behavior as to validate this specific psychological construct in the context of educational hypermedia. The second and third experiments present the effect of a set of human factors (cognitive style, visual working memory span, control/speed of processing, and anxiety) in an adaptive educational system. The eye tracking experiment demonstrated that eye gaze patterns are robustly related to cognitive style (n = 21), while matching the instructional style to users´ characteristics was revealed to be statistically significant in optimizing users´ performance ( n = 219), with the exception of control/speed of processing. Based on this empirical assessment, this paper argues that individual differences at this intrinsic level are important and adaptation on these parameters through personalization technologies may have a positive effect on learning performance.