From the perspective of the user experience of media products, the study primarily focuses on the influence of users’ interaction mode on cognitive absorption. Specifically, 80 participants were recruited and randomly assigned to different interactive modes: a conversational interactive news interface and a webpage-based interactive news interface. They needed to be recorded with an EEG during the interaction and completion of the cognitive absorption (CA) scale after the interaction. The results demonstrated that there were significant differences in CA between the webpage-based interaction group and the conversational interaction group. Meanwhile, the PSD of theta and delta bands under the conversational interaction group appeared to be significantly higher. Besides, the frontal EEG asymmetry in the conversational interaction group was significantly higher than in the webpage-based interaction group. In contrast, the individual alpha frequency of the webpage-based interaction group was higher than that of the conversational interaction group. These results suggest that conversational interaction reduces the user’s reading difficulty while also reduces the cognitive load in the process of task. This helps improve user’s level of being immersed, enjoyment, sense of control, and curiosity while also improving users’ cognitive absorption as they also exhibit stronger positive emotional experiences.

News aggregator apps have become one of the major channels for acquiring information for the Chinese. The number of users is increasing but literature on the user experience (UX) of these apps from the perspective of human-computer interaction remains dearth. In study 1, a completely randomized between-participant experiment with prior experience of news aggregator apps (with prior experience vs. without prior experience) as the independent variable was conducted to investigate its effects on the UX of news aggregator app’s functions, including browsing news, searching news, watching short videos, interacting with news, personalized page setup and online shopping. UX was operationalized as perceived usefulness, ease of use, and satisfaction. Results indicated that the experienced users perceived lower levels of usefulness when they used the app to browse news, watch short videos, interact with news and set up the page than inexperienced users. Experienced users also perceived lower levels of ease of use when watching short videos. In addition, veteran users reported lower satisfaction levels when browsing the news. To explore the reason behind this phenomenon, a sentiment analysis (study 2) was conducted on the reports submitted by participants in the experienced group during the training sessions. It was found that the experienced group overall reported negative sentiment scores, and the results indicated positive trends of correlation between the sentiment score and the UX. The current research provides a more nuanced understanding of the effect of prior experience on the UX of news aggregator apps.

Emojis play an increasingly important role as nonverbal symbols in online communication, and this study investigates their effect on the processing of subsequent words. We suppose that emojis, as an aid to emotional expression and semantic comprehension, prime the cognitive processing of the textual stimuli that follow. An affective priming experiment using ERPs was conducted, in which Semantic Relationship between the emoji and the word (Congruent, Incongruent, Non-related) was manipulated to assess their impact in an affective word categorization task. Behavioral results revealed no significant difference, while electrophysiological data showed otherwise. N1 component elicited by semantically congruent and incongruent emoji-word pairs showed greater amplitudes than those by non-related pairs. N400 elicited by incongruent pairs showed greater amplitudes than the N400 by congruent pairs. These data indicate that while emojis do not influence the outcomes of linguistic processing, emoji primes enhance attentional level, and semantically congruent contents demand fewer cognitive resources and facilitate better processing in comparison to incongruent ones. The findings point to emojis’ role not only as affective primes, but also as paralanguage that is semantically processed. Implications for computer-mediated communication are discussed.