The impact of cognitive styles on perceptual distributed multimedia quality

Multimedia technology has been widely used in the delivery of instructional material, but previous studies have indicated that individual differences, especially cognitive styles, have significant effects on users’ preferences with respect to presentation of multimedia content. However, such research has thus far neglected to examine the effect of cognitive styles on users’ subjective perceptions of multimedia quality. This study aims to examine the relationships between users’ cognitive styles, the multimedia Quality of Service delivered by the underlying network, and users’ Quality of Perception, which encompasses user levels of enjoyment and understanding of the informational content provided by multimedia material. Accordingly, 132 users took part in an experiment in which they were shown multimedia video clips presented with different values of two Quality of Service parameters (frame rate and colour depth). Results show that, whilst the two QoS parameters do not impact user QoP, multimedia content and dynamism levels significantly influence the user understanding and enjoyment component of QoP.