Understanding illustrated texts

Pauline Frick, PhD student in the Multiple Representations lab, successfully completed her dissertation on March 25, providing new insights into the understanding of illustrated texts. Her work sheds light on the cognitive processes that play a role in reading and processing texts with images.

Illustrated texts are an integral part of our everyday lives, but their influence on text comprehension has not yet been fully researched. While the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning focuses on active processing, models of text comprehension often emphasise passive processes. The Resonance-Integration-Validation model (RI-Val) describes passive cognitive mechanisms that function continuously while reading mainly non-illustrated texts.

The role of images in text comprehension

In nine experiments, Frick investigated whether and how these passive processes also occur in illustrated texts. The results show that activation, integration and validation processes also apply when reading illustrated texts. In addition, a meta-analytical summary of four of the experiments revealed that added images slightly accelerated these processes.

Pauline is making an important contribution to research in the field of multimedia learning with her dissertation. Her work could help to improve didactic materials and teaching methods by further deciphering the role of images in text comprehension.