Pictures, high-imagery news language and news recall

Newspaper Research Journal, Summer 1998 by David, Prabu, Kang, Jagdeep

In this study, both news pictures and high-imagery news copy produced a significant gain in news recall.

One of the important properties of news is its ability to create images.

Although the imagery-evoking potential of news pictures is obvious, news language is also capable of evoking imagery. Examples of such verbal journalistic work that has high imagery-evoking potential can be found in feature stories that appear on the front page of the Wall Street Journal or can be heard during weekend programs on National Public Radio. Imagery induced by news language can be as potent as visual images and can have significant effects on memory. To test this hypothesis, gain in news recall from the addition of pictures was compared to gain in recall from the addition of high-imagery copy.

Literature review, hypotheses

Studies that address the role of pictures in text learning are followed by a review of studies on verbal imagery and recall. Finally, Allan Paivio's dualcoding theory1 is presented as a theoretical framework for explaining the advantage in recall for visual and verbal images.

Pictures in text processing

Researchers in communication, education and consumer behavior have examined how pictures influence learning of text. The consensus is that pictures indeed facilitate recall of text, although the interaction between pictures and text is complex.2 There are numerous ways through which pictures facilitate processing of text: by evoking an affective or emotional response, by facilitating comprehension and retention, and by augmenting the information presented in the copy.3 On the other hand, it is also possible that pictures distract the reader and draw attention away from the text. Further, detractors" argue that coding of pictures is cheap because it takes less than a third of a second to encode a picture,5 which sets the tone for shallow processing of the text, resulting in poor learning and memory. But when there is a high degree of congruence between the picture and the copy, there are benefits in learning, especially when the dependent variable is free recall.6 These findings are similar to the findings reported in experiments with redundant audio-video television stimuli.7

In recent research, mass communication scholars have used information graphics to study how pictures facilitate learning from text. Steve Pasternack and Sandra Utt8 report that readers use information graphics strategically to seek out information. J. Votika Ramaprasad" found that the reader's understanding from information graphics was limited and that the information presented in the graphic sometimes misled the reader. However, in a systematic program of research, Jeffrey Griffin and Robert Stevenson" have demonstrated how various information graphic tools such as locator maps, explanatory graphics and graphs facilitate learning. The thrust of their findings is that redundant information presented graphically and through body copy improves learning. Hence, the first hypothesis is a replication of the basic finding from the mass communication and journalism literature that the addition of redundant pictures to text improves recall.

H1: Addition of representative pictures to news copy will improve recall.

Imagery in text processing

While numerous studies have shown that vivid and highly captivating pictures are memorable, high-imagery copy too can have significant effects on memory. For centuries civilizations have used oral history, a verbal medium, as a means of passing along memories and images from the past. The importance of imagistic language in news processing was highlighted by James Tankard and Laura Hendrickson,11who found that high-imagery or show sentences were more engaging and interesting than feel sentences.

Imagery is defined in the literature as the representation of any sensory experience in working memory.l2 In the work presented here, visual imagery refers to imagery induced by pictorial stimuli, such as pictures, photos, illustrations, etc. Verbal imagery, on the other hand, is used here as imagery induced in the mind's eye by non-pictorial verbal language.

One of the key predictors of imagery-evoking potential is concreteness. Imagery and concreteness are so highly correlated"3 that researchers often use these terms interchangeably. Concreteness and imagery-evoking potential have also been found to be very good predictors of recall. For example, concrete nouns, such as flag or map, are recalled better than abstract nouns, such as justice or freedom.l4

Several researchers have shown how concreteness or high-imagery language affects recall of text passages and other material. Studies show that concreteness is highly correlated with recall for experimenter-constructed sentences"5 as well as published expository text segments.l6 Sentences with concrete adjectives and modifiers were recalled better by adults than sentences redundantly modified"7 or sentences containing dull adjectives. Concrete versions of prose passages were remembered better than abstract passages,18which were otherwise matched on various dimensions. These findings led to the next hypothesis.