Knowledge Media Research Center, Tuebingen, Germany.
Memory. 2012;20(7):682-99. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2012.693935. Epub 2012 Jun 26.
Two studies are reported that tested the assumption that learning is improved by presenting text and pictures compared to text only when the text conveys non-spatial rather than spatial information. In Experiment 1, 59 students learned with text containing either visual or spatial contents, both accompanied by the same pictures. The results confirmed the expected interference between the processing of spatial text contents and pictures: Learners who received text containing spatial information showed worse text and picture recall than learners who received text containing visual information. In Experiment 2, 85 students were randomly assigned to one of four conditions, which resulted from a 2 × 2 between-participants design, with picture presentation (with vs without) and text contents (visual vs spatial) as between-participants factors. Again the results confirmed the expected interference between processing of spatial text information and pictures, because beneficial effects of adding pictures to text were observed only when the texts conveyed visual information. Importantly, when no pictures were present no differences were observed between learners with either visual or spatial texts contents, indicating that the observed effects are not caused by absolute differences between the two texts such as their difficulty. The implications of these results are discussed.
报告了两项研究，这些研究检验了这样一种假设，即在文本中呈现文字和图片比仅呈现文字更能提高学习效果，前提是文本传达的是非空间信息而不是空间信息。在实验 1 中，59 名学生学习了包含视觉或空间内容的文本，同时都附有相同的图片。结果证实了处理空间文本内容和图片之间的预期干扰：接收包含空间信息的文本的学习者的文本和图片回忆比接收包含视觉信息的文本的学习者差。在实验 2 中，85 名学生被随机分配到四个条件之一，这是由于 2 × 2 被试间设计产生的，图片呈现（有与无）和文本内容（视觉与空间）是被试间因素。结果再次证实了处理空间文本信息和图片之间的预期干扰，因为只有当文本传达视觉信息时，向文本添加图片才会产生有益的效果。重要的是，当没有图片时，无论是视觉文本内容还是空间文本内容的学习者之间都没有观察到差异，这表明观察到的效果不是由两种文本之间的绝对差异（例如其难度）引起的。讨论了这些结果的含义。
