Abstract

Animation safety videos have begun to play a substantial role in communicating safety procedures on in-flight air travel. This paper demonstrates that the choice between the printed experience of traditional airline safety manuals vs. the visual animation experience of safety videos rely on consumers’ cognitive preferences. The research methodology is contingent with an open-ended and close-ended study covering a sample of forty well-traveled participants categorized under two age groups (19 to 39 and 40 to 70). Each group was benchmarked based on two modes of cognitive behaviors Visualizers and Verbalizers. The participants were asked to delineate their cognitive preferences based on three categories i.e., meaningful, engaging, and visual appeal of in-flight safety material. The preliminary findings established that 95 percent of the participants of nineteen to thirty-nine years’ age group strongly agreed that in-flight safety animation videos were more meaningful than traditional printed manuals, whereas 35 percent of the fifty to seventy age group disagreed that in-flight safety animation videos were more meaningful than print manuals. Surprisingly, based on the overall percentage of the categorical preferences, the empirical data found that both age groups were visualizers more than verbalizers were. These findings provide primary data under the visual communication field, delineating the relationship between age and cognition preferences when it comes to animation safety videos.