Kruley, P., Sciama, S. C., & Glenberg, A. M. (1994). On-line processing of textual illustrations in the visuospatial sketchpad: Evidence from dual-task studies. Memory and Cognition, 22(3), 261-272.

Kruley, P.; Sciama, S.; Glenberg, A.

1994

Kruley, P., Sciama, S. C., & Glenberg, A. M. (1994). On-line processing of textual illustrations in the visuospatial sketchpad: Evidence from dual-task studies. Memory and Cognition, 22(3), 261-272.

1

We present evidence that the comprehension of illustrated text makes use of the visuospatial sketchpad component of working memory. The results from three experiments demonstrate that the comprehending of texts that are accompanied by pictures interferes with the performance of a spatial short-term memory task more than does the comprehending of texts that have no pictures. A fourth experiment demonstrates that the interference is found only when there is a requirement to comprehend the text; that is, the simple presentation of the texts and their pictures did not degrade performance on the spatial task. Finally, we show that the comprehension of illustrated texts does not differentially interfere with a verbal short-term memory task. These results are consistent with the claim that illustrations accompanying a text encourage the formation of a spatial mental model with the use of the working memory's sketchpad.

Experiment 1 demonstrated that the presence of a picture did interact with the concurrent task, a task that required the use of the visuospatial sketchpad for memory. Although the absence of a significant interaction in the comprehension data indicates that the picture improved comprehension equally regardless of the concurrent task, the dot task data indicate that performance of the preload task was impaired by the presence of a picture during comprehension.

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