Glenberg, A. M., & Langston, W. E. (1992). Comprehension of illustrated text: Pictures help to build mental models.. Journal of Memory and Language, 31(2), 129-151.

Glenberg, A.; Langston, W.

1992

Glenberg, A. M., & Langston, W. E. (1992). Comprehension of illustrated text: Pictures help to build mental models.. Journal of Memory and Language, 31(2), 129-151.

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Pictures help people to comprehend and remember texts. We report two experiments designed to test among several accounts of this facilitation. Students read texts describing four-step procedures in which the middle steps were described as occurring at the same time, although the verbal description of the steps was sequential. A mental representation of the procedure would have the middle steps equally strongly related to the preceding and succeeding steps (because the middle steps are performed simultaneously), whereas a mental representation of the text would have the middle step that was described first more closely related to the preceding step than the middle step described second. After reading, strengths of the represented relationships between the steps were assessed. When the texts were accompanied by appropriate pictures, subjects tended to mentally represent the procedure. When the texts were presented alone or with pictures illustrating the order in which the steps were described in the text, subjects tended to mentally represent the text. We argue that these results disconfirm motivational, repetition, and some dual code explanations of the facilitative effects of pictures. The results are consistent with a version of mental model theory that proposes that pictures help to build mental models of what the text is about.

The performance in the linear picture condition was notably poorer than in the with-picture condition, and it was even worse than in the no-picture condition. Thus the facilitation produced by a picture is not due to simply having the step names available during reading, nor is it due to availability of a concrete instantiation of the step names. Instead, the picture must support an appropriate mental model. Second, we replicated the finding from Experiment 1 that appropriate pictures help readers to build representations with structures more similar to the procedures described by the text than to the structure of the text.

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