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The modality effect is a term used in experimental psychology, most often in the fields dealing with memory and learning, to refer to how learner performance depends on the presentation mode of studied items.
In his book The Humane Interface, Jef Raskin defines modality as follows: "An human-machine interface is modal with respect to a given gesture when (1) the current state of the interface is not the user's locus of attention and (2) the interface will execute one among several different responses to the gesture, depending on the system's current state."
The most common example given of crossmodal attention is the Cocktail Party Effect, which is when a person is able to focus and attend to one important stimulus instead of other less important stimuli. This phenomenon allows deeper levels of processing to occur for one stimulus while others are then ignored.
An example for a non-European language with a similar encoding of modality is Manam. Here, a verb is prefixed by a morpheme which encodes number and person of the subject. These prefixes come in two versions, realis and irrealis .
Some combinations of signs can be multi-modal, i.e. different types of signs grouped together for effect. But the distinction between a medium and a modality should be clarified: text is a medium for presenting the modality of natural language; image is both a medium and a modality; music is a modality for the auditory media.
For example, the inferred certainty sense of English must developed after the strong obligation sense; the probabilistic sense of should developed after the weak obligation sense; and the possibility senses of may and can developed later than the permission or ability sense. Two typical sequences of evolution of modal meanings are:
Modal verb, a type of auxiliary verb that is used to indicate modality; Modal window, computer user interface development: a child window that requires users to interact with it before they can return to operating the parent application; A trade name for sulpiride, an atypical antipsychotic drug
Mode effect is a broad term referring to a phenomenon where a particular survey administration mode causes different data to be collected. For example, when asking a question using two different modes ( e.g. paper and telephone), responses to one mode may be significantly and substantially different from responses given in the other mode.