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Changes in conceptualization and measurement of the verbalizer-visualizer dimension led us to re-examine the hypothesis that students learn best when instructional material matches their cognitive style. First-year psychology university students (n=41) studied information on three personality theories presented in text only, text+picture, or text+schematic diagram format, demonstrated recall and comprehension of each theory, and completed an adapted cognitive styles questionnaire. Spatial and object visual scale scores were not correlated, but the latter showed a significant though relatively weak negative correlation with verbal scale scores. Recall could be predicted from students' verbal and object visual scores when presentation format matched these ...

Lay people have difficulty understanding the meaning of environmental health risk information. Visual images can use features that leverage visual perception capabilities and semiotic conventions to promote meaningful comprehension. Such evidence-based features were employed to develop two images of a color-coded visual scale to convey drinking water test results. The effect of these images and a typical alphanumeric (AN) lab report were explored in a repeated measures randomized trial among 261 undergraduates. Outcome measures included risk beliefs, emotions, personal safety threshold, mitigation intentions, the durability of beliefs and intentions over time, and test result recall. The plain image conveyed the ...

Risk communications are an integral aspect of health education and promotion. However, the commonly used textual risk information is relatively difficult to understand for the average recipient. Consequently, researchers and health promoters have started to focus on so-called decision aids, such as tables and graphs. Although tabular and graphical risk information more effectively communicate risks than textual risk information, the cognitive mechanisms responsible for this enhancement are unclear. This study aimed to examine two possible mechanisms (i.e., cognitive workload and attention). Cognitive workload (mean pupil size and peak pupil dilation) and attention directed to the risk information (viewing time, number ...

In three experiments, students read expository passages concerning how scientific devices work, which contained either no illustrations (control), static illustrations of the device with labels for each part (parts), static illustrations of the device with labels for each major action (steps), or dynamic illustrations showing the "off" and "on" states of the device along with labels for each part and each major action (parts-and-steps). Results indicated that the parts-and-steps (but not the other) illustrations consistently improved performance on recall of conceptual (but not nonconceptual) information and creative problem solving (but not verbatim retention), and these results were obtained mainly for the low prior-knowledge ...

In 4 experiments, college students viewed an animation and listened to concurrent narration explaining the formation of lightning. When students also received concurrent on-screen text that summarized (Experiment 1) or duplicated (Experiment 2) the narration, they performed worse on tests of retention and transfer than did students who received no on-screen text. This redundancy effect is consistent with a dual-channel theory of multimedia learning in which adding on-screen text can overload the visual information-processing channel, causing learners to split their visual attention between 2 sources. Lower transfer performance also occurred when the authors added interesting but irrelevant details to the narration (Experiment 1) ...

In 4 experiments, college students viewed an animation and listened to concurrent narration explaining the formation of lightning. When students also received concurrent on-screen text that summarized (Experiment 1) or duplicated (Experiment 2) the narration, they performed worse on tests of retention and transfer than did students who received no on-screen text. This redundancy effect is consistent with a dual-channel theory of multimedia learning in which adding on-screen text can overload the visual information-processing channel, causing learners to split their visual attention between 2 sources. Lower transfer performance also occurred when the authors added interesting but irrelevant details to the narration (Experiment 1) ...

In 4 experiments, college students viewed an animation and listened to concurrent narration explaining the formation of lightning. When students also received concurrent on-screen text that summarized (Experiment 1) or duplicated (Experiment 2) the narration, they performed worse on tests of retention and transfer than did students who received no on-screen text. This redundancy effect is consistent with a dual-channel theory of multimedia learning in which adding on-screen text can overload the visual information-processing channel, causing learners to split their visual attention between 2 sources. Lower transfer performance also occurred when the authors added interesting but irrelevant details to the narration (Experiment 1) or inserted interesting but ...

In 4 experiments, college students viewed an animation and listened to concurrent narration explaining the formation of lightning. When students also received concurrent on-screen text that summarized (Experiment 1) or duplicated (Experiment 2) the narration, they performed worse on tests of retention and transfer than did students who received no on-screen text. This redundancy effect is consistent with a dual-channel theory of multimedia learning in which adding on-screen text can overload the visual information-processing channel, causing learners to split their visual attention between 2 sources. Lower transfer performance also occurred when the authors added interesting but irrelevant details to the narration (Experiment ...

Related is a project in which the city of Bochum & the Ruhr U of Bochum collaborated with the objective of making the texts produced by the various departments of the municipal administration more intelligible to citizens. The project consisted of three parts: (1) identification of domains in which written communication between the municipal government & citizens is most negatively affected by the language, jargon, & style of texts produced by the former, (2) a joint development of solutions leading to the creation of texts which are more readable & comprehensible for an average citizen, & (3) an implementation of ...

We examined whether timeline icons improved older and younger adults' comprehension of medication information. In Experiment 1, comprehension of instructions with the icon (icon/text format) and without the icon (textonly format) was assessed by questions about information that was (a) implicit in the text but depicted explicitly by the icon (total dose in a 24 hour period), (b) stated and depicted in the icon/text condition (medication dose and times), and (c) stated but not depicted by the icon (e.g., side effects). In a separate task, participants also recalled medication instructions (with or without the icon) after a study period. We ...