Dear Reviewer,
first of all I want to thank you for your thoughtful comments on our paper. We carefully read
your advices and considered them as follows.
Theoretical background
(1) In your review is stated, that you do not see the relation of changes in motivation (in this
case: situational interest and intrinsic motivation) to changes in attention allocation. To
adress that question we changed the relevant passage with regard to a stronger focus on the
processes „facilitation“ and „focusing“ which are seen to be driven by (1) self referencing
(e.g. cognitive perspective derived from Rogers) and (2) by interest/intrinsic motivation (e.g.
motivational perspective derived from Mayer & Moreno). Both implicate a facilitation
combined by a focusing of processing: the first is due to the activation of structures of the
self and an initiation of motivation which – on a basic information processing level result in
an activation of attentional resources. In turn those resources should be allocated with a
more focused direction of information processing in regard to the personalized information.
(2) With regard to your second point – (facilitation effect a purel motivational effect): we
hope by the above mentioned rearrangements of textual parts it is clearer that the
facilitation assumption is not only based on a motivational background, but instead there
are multiple explanatory approaches to explain the personalisation effect (see Reichelt et al.,
2014). One of those is the cognitive perspective derived from Rogers (1978). We therefore
depicted the origin of the „facilitation and focusing assumption“ as a result of both
perspectives.
(3) In consideration of the third point we reorganized the table as you proposed and think
that indeed the relevant information is more easy to „read“ now.
(4) Regarding the fourth point of your review we included the references, the hypothesis is
based upon. Especially the publication by Reichelt et al. (2014) proposes an overview of
explanatory approaches.
Methods
1) The questionnaire proposed by Koch, Seufert & Brünken (2008) is based on a
recommendation made by Kalyuga & Paas (2004) to distinguish the three different types of
load held in a conference in 2004. In order to have the possibility to disinguish between (1)
the mental load/intrinsic load induced by the complexity of the learning content, (2) the
perceived mental load with regard to the instructional design characteristics/extrinsic load
and (3) mental effort/germane load, we used the questionnaire which includes 7 items.
Mainly for intrinsic/extrinsic (mental load) and germane load (mental effort) we expected
different findings with regard to facilitation and focusing. Nonetheless, statistically we
couldn`t find the expected pattern of three (or at least two types of cognitive load (based on
items regarding perceived difficulty and invested mental effort) and therefore subsumed all
items to an overall measure of cognitive load.
2) We changed the declaration of the methods to gain AOIs. According to your advice we
removed the term „objective“ and instead used data driven and hypothesis driven.
Moreover we made a clear statement on the method finally used.
Results
1) In your first point covering the results section you suggest to report standard deviations.
After discussing that point again in our group, we resigned to report those, because U-tests
are calculated on the basis of the median, which are seen to be robust regarding outliers.
Consequently we reported the medians instead of the means and standard deviations.
2) We reported the results of gaze data analyses over all screens and for single screen 3. The
experiement was not planned as a repeated measurement study. During data analysis we
systematically analysed data for each screen. Finally, due to the brevity of the paper we
decided to report the over all pattern and to use one proper example to accentuate the
findings on a more fine grained level.
Minor concerns
(1) The table numbers are corrected now.
(2) AOIs are renamed with more informative labellings.
(3) Physical aspects of t he eye tracker are already mentioned in the procedure section.
(4) Van Gog et al. (2005) is included regarding cued retrospective reporting.
(5) Co-authors of Holmquist (2011) are included now.
(6) We used the more recent reference of Rayner.
Thank you again for your careful suggestions and questions regarding our paper. We found
those were very helpful to increase the quality of the submission.