Comprehension and object recognition capabilities for presentations of simultaneous video key frame surrogates

The demand for more efficient browsing of video data is expected to increase as greater access to this type of data becomes available. This experiment looked at one technique for displaying video data using key frame surrogates that are presented as a ldquoslide showrdquo. Subjects viewed key frames for between one and four video clips simultaneously. Following this presentation, the subjects performed object recognition and gist comprehension tasks in order to determine human thresholds for divided attention between these multiple displays. It was our belief that subject performance would degrade as the number of slide shows shown simultaneously increased. For object recognition and gist comprehension tasks, a decrease in performance between the one slide show display and the two, three or four slide show displays was found. In the case of two or three video presentations, performance is about the same, and there remains adequate object recognition abilities and comprehension of the video clips. Performance drops off to unacceptable levels when four slide shows are displayed at once.