ABSTRACT
In addition to cartoon films, animation is increasingly used to present knowledge and information in teaching and formal communications to supplement text or to provide a visual explanation of a complex process. Animation is also valuable in experiments on cognition and psychology as it is a powerful and convenient tool for creating dynamic visual resources. When examining the unique value of animation clips used as symbol, a key issue is how its visual elements are designed and organized to correspond to the logical content, in other words, the coding process of the animation. The goals of the experimental study presented in this article were to explore how viewers cognize a simple shape’s basic motion and form a judgment based on intuition, and then to find existed law and rules of the coding and decoding of animation clips used as logic symbol. The results suggest that there is an unstable trend that the viewer of the animation forms a basic logical understanding based on the visual features or motion characteristics, instead of based on both of them mixed simultaneously. In order to achieve a consensus based on watching animation clips, the coding rules need to be predetermined and clear.
