How Inspecting a Picture Affects Processing of Text in Multimedia Learning

Abstract

We investigated how a picture fosters learning from text, both with self-paced presentation and with short presentation before text. In an experiment, participants (N = 114) learned about the structure and functioning of a pulley system in one of six conditions: text only, picture presentation for 150 milliseconds, 600 milliseconds, or 2 seconds, or self-paced before text, or self-paced concurrent presentation of text and picture. Presenting the picture for self-paced study time, both before and concurrently with text, fostered recall and comprehension and sped up text processing compared with presenting text only. Moreover, even inspecting the picture for only 600 milliseconds or 2 seconds improved comprehension and yielded faster reading of subsequent text about the spatial structure of the system compared with text only. These findings suggest that pictures, even if attended for a short time only, may yield a spatial mental scaffold that allows for the integration with verbal information, thereby fostering comprehension.

Input modality and working memory: Effects on second language text comprehension in a multimedia learning environment

“…Additionally, in the visual-only condition, the presence of visual support along with verbal information might have contributed to the elimination of the effects of WM capacity. In other words, the pictures might have helped the learners to form an adequate mental representation of the text, leading to better comprehension as demonstrated by Eitel, Scheiter, and Schüler (2013). Most previous research on the effect of WM capacity on reading comprehension in the L2 did not employ visuals and they involved learning with just text.…”

Disfluency Meets Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning: Does Harder‐to‐Read Mean Better‐to‐Understand?

“…Instead, we concentrated on investigating beneficial effects from making text less legible. In particular, we tried to distinguish whether beneficial effects in Experiment 1 were mainly because of a deeper processing of text or additionally because of a more frequent and more intense processing of the pictures (triggered by less legible text), which could be assumed because a more thorough processing of pictures has been shown to foster learning outcomes (e.g., Eitel, Scheiter, & Schüler, ).…”

Metacognition in self-regulated multimedia learning: integrating behavioural, psychophysiological and introspective measures

“…Thanks to eye tracking, Eitel, Scheiter, and Schüler (2013) were enabled to derive the notion that when students explore pictures before processing written or spoken text, global information extracted is used as a scaffold to facilitate the construction of a mental model, as shown previously (Schnotz and Bannert 2003;McCrudden, Magliano, and Schraw 2011). In another eye-tracking study, abstract figures, compared to concrete representations, enabled more efficient processing of the text, even though a greater effort to integrate verbal and pictorial information is needed to do so (Mason et al 2013).…”