Mayer, R.E., & Anderson, R.B. (1991). Animations need narrations: an experimental test of a dual-coding hypothesis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 83(4), 484-490.

Mayer, R,; Anderson, R.

1991

Mayer, R.E., & Anderson, R.B. (1991). Animations need narrations: an experimental test of a dual-coding hypothesis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 83(4), 484-490.

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In 2 experiments, mechanically naive college students viewed an animation depicting the operation of a bicycle tire pump that included a verbal description given before (words-beforepictures) or during (words-with-pictures) the animation. The words-with-pictures group outperformed the words-before-pictures group on tests of creative problem solving that involved reasoning about how the pump works. In a follow-up experiment, students in the words-withpictures group performed better on the problem-solving test than students who saw the animation without words (pictures only), heard the words without the animation (words only), or received no training (control). Results support a dual-coding hypothesis (Paivio, 1990) that posits two kinds of connections: representational connections between verbal stimuli and verbal representations and between visual stimuli and visual representations and referential connections between visual and verbal representations.

The simultaneous presentation of verbal narration and visual animation resulted in substantially better problem-solving performance than did the separate presentation of words and pictures.

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