The impact of presentation media on decision making: Does multimedia improve the effectiveness of feedback?

This paper reports an experiment that examines the impact of presentation media on the effectiveness of feedback information in a decision-making task. The study was based on control theory and resource-matching theory (RMT). A laboratory experiment with 72 participants was conducted in the context of providing feedback when using a decision support system. Consistent with hypotheses derived from theory, when negative feedback is delivered using non-vivid (textual (TEXT)) messages, it induces a higher level of subsequent task performance than when it is delivered using vivid (multimedia (MM)) messages. On the other hand, contrary to the expectation from Control theory, negative feedback, in general, does not lead to a higher level of subsequent task performance. The implications of the findings on multimedia are discussed. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.