Abstract
Investigation of the role of pictures in children’s comprehension and retention of written texts has produced reports of very different levels of facilitation. This article reviews the literature with respect to a proposed explanatory model that relates the differential pictorial facilitation to the type of material used and the children’s strategy in approaching it. It is suggested that the reported enhancement of factual texts results from the utilization of pictorial adjuncts to promote encoding of a distinct and unique conceptual unit, the subsequent retrieval of which is thereby improved. With story text, the effectiveness of pictures as encoding aids is limited by the predominance of the story schema in determining encoding and retrieval.
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Rusted, J. Differential facilitation by pictures of children’s retention of written texts: A review. Current Psychology 3, 61–71 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02686524
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02686524