Gyselinck, V., & Tardieu, H. (1994). Illustrations, mental models, and comprehension of instructional text. Advances in psychology, 108, 139-151.

Gyselinck, V; Tardieu, H.

1994

Gyselinck, V., & Tardieu, H. (1994). Illustrations, mental models, and comprehension of instructional text. Advances in psychology, 108, 139-151.

Considering that an illustration can be regarded as one possible external expression of a part of a mental model, we investigated the role of illustrations in the strengthening of a mental model built from an instructional text. In a first phase, two groups of subjects read a text dealing with the cellular division process. In a second phase, a group saw drawings alone which illustrated the process, whereas the other group read the text again. In each phase, two comprehension tests were used to evaluate the representation built by subjects. The course of reading was interrupted by questions assumed to reflect either a linguistic representation (paraphrases) or a mental model (inferences), and subjects had to verify inference statements at the end of the presentation. Results showed that gain in performance between the two phases was the same whether the subjects had seen the illustrations or the text again. This absence of difference was observed during as well as at the end of the presentation, and for paraphrases as well as for inferences. It therefore appears that the mental model has to reach a sufficient level of elaboration, in order that illustrations alone can reinforce it.

The major results was that differences in performance between the two phases were similar for the two groups. More precisely, the presentation of the drawings led to performance improvement comparable to the second presentation of the text. This result suggets that graphic information and linguistic information allow for the construction of mental representation with very similar properties.

64

1