Cognitive Styles and Visual Quality

Assessors are the main measurement instruments in subjective quality evaluation studies. Although the perceptual abilities and constrains are influenced by multiple demographic and psychographic factors, they are typically disregarded as a part of quality assessment. Cognitive styles refer to individual's consistent approaches to organize and represent information. Goal of this study is to explore the impact of cognitive styles on visual quality requirements. The data collection is conducted using the Style of Processing (SOP) questionnaire in three video quality experiments with a total of 72 participants. All participants were categorized into four groups according to sensorial preferences in information processing (visual, verbal, bimodal - high processing, and bimodal - low processing). The experiments were conducted in controlled circumstances when varying depth in video quality with several content types on the mobile device. The results show variation in quality requirements between these groups. Finally, these results also indicate that sensorial processing styles are essential to explore for sample characterization in quality evaluation experiments and for exploring more user-aware quality adjustments in future services and products.