Conceptual Grouping of Text and Pictures
Conceptual grouping is a process that involves processing multiple concepts as a single entity. One popular form of conceptual grouping is chunking. Colloquially, chunking is a strategy explicitly carried out in order to improve memory. Humans are generally capable of holding about 5-7 items in memory at a time, so most may find it difficult to remember the following string fo numbers: 9851250923223. Now, I personally can chunk this string of numbers by recognizing that the first five numbers 98512 is the zipcode for Olympia, WA; the next three numbers 509 are an area code used in eastern Washington; and the last five numbers 23223 are a zipcode for Richmond, VA. So, using my own established knowledge markers, this is actually a fairly easy set of numbers for me to memorize.
Now, how often is it that you are required to memorize a long string of numbers like that?? Okay, occasionally. But thinking more practically, we can consider the more complicated process played by conceptual grouping while reading. As you read a letter, you recall its properties. As you read a word, those letters are grouped into a concept. As you read a sentence, those singular concepts are grouped into a more collective concept. As you read a paragraph, that collective of sentences is unified into a more singular concept. Now let’s think about this. Do you remember the last seven words you read? (Okay, maybe you do..). Do you think you could recall the past five sentences word-for-word? Or, lets make it easier. How about just recalling the topic of each of the past five sentences? That sounds pretty difficult, but I imagine you could probably recall the topic of the last paragraph or two.
At this point, I think you get the idea.
To go further, this study looked at the combination of words and images. It is very common for reading materials, whether they be a textbook, magazine, or a news article, to have images accompanying the main text. Sometimes these images are related to the text, other times they are not. We wondered, do unrelated images disrupt the complex process of conceptual grouping while reading?
To answer this question, we presented participants with cryptic paragraphs, presented one word at a time. Mixed in with the paragraphs were images that were either related, or unrelated to the paragraph. We asked participants to recall the paragraph as well as they could, then to describe the topic of the paragraph. We also had the participants identify the image they were shown (when an image was presented).
We were able to conclude that memory for the paragraph and image was not changed by the relationship of the image to the paragraph, but when presented with an unrelated image, participants were less capable of identifying the topic of the paragraph.
Think about that for a second! The memory for the paragraph was the same, but the participants were not able to understand as well what it meant! These findings have widespread implications with regard to the combination of text and images in reading materials.
Collaborators
Publication
The manuscript for this project has been published in the Journal of Cognitive Psychology! Find it here: Show me the meaning! The contextual relevance of images influences the recall and understanding of multimedia RSVP paragraphs
