ABSTRACT

In this study we investigated whether the beneficial effect of adding illustrations to text can be explained by the fact that illustrations facilitate analogous mental representation construction from text in visuospatial working memory. For this the secondary task paradigm was used. It was expected that the secondary task interfered only with learning from text when no illustrations were presented beforehand, because here learners have to construct an analogous mental model on their own, and consequently working memory load should be high. No interference of the secondary task was expected when illustrations were presented. Additionally, it was assumed that learners with illustration performed on a higher level. Contrast analyses confirmed this data pattern when reading (Experiments 1 and 3) or listening to the text (Experiment 2) and with less (Experiments 1 and 2) and more complex learning materials (Experiment 3) for recall tasks. These findings indicate that illustrations before text supported learners in constructing an analogous mental representation from the text, explaining why no secondary task interference was observed when illustrations were presented. The implications of these findings are discussed.

摘要

在这项研究中，我们调查了是否可以通过插图促进视觉空间工作记忆中的文本从心理构造类似的现象来说明在文本上添加插图的有益效果。为此，使用了辅助任务范式。可以预期的是，在事先未提供插图的情况下，次要任务只会干扰文本学习，因为在这里学习者必须自己构建一个类似的心理模型，因此工作记忆负荷应该很高。介绍插图时，预期不会干扰次要任务。另外，假设具有插图的学习者的表现更高。对比分析在阅读（实验1和3）或听课文（实验2），少用（实验1和2）和使用更复杂的学习材料（实验3）进行回忆时证实了这种数据模式。这些发现表明，课文之前的插图支持学习者从课文中构建类似的心理表征，从而解释了为什么在演示插图时没有观察到次要任务的干扰。讨论了这些发现的含义。