Experimental Study of Demotivators and Memes Perception Complexity

Abstract

The article presents the results of a pilot study of the perception of the demotivator and meme genres. It was a part of an experimental study of psychophysiological and psycholinguistic features of perception and understanding of multimodal extremist texts. The aim of the study is to develop and test the hypothesis about the influence of genre on perception of multimodal texts. To test the hypothesis, we analyze the respondents' eye movement data from the main experimental study (n = 60; 31 forensic linguists with anti-extremism practice, 29 non-experts). Research methods were eye-tracking and quantitative data processing. The following statistically reliable data were obtained: compared to memes, respondents looked at demotivators (1) for a longer time, made (2) shorter fixations, (3) with more of them, and also made (4) faster and (5) shorter saccades. These parameters may indicate a denser scanning pattern of viewing demotivators compared to memes and greater cognitive expenditure in assessing the semantic content of demotivator texts. The results of the study suggest a connection between genre and the degree of multimodal texts perception complexity. This provides an opportunity for further research in this direction and, in the future, will enable the development of norms of cognitive load of judicial linguists who analyse multimodal extremist texts.