Why Do Illustrations Promote Text Comprehension? Motivation Effect and Elaboration Effect

This paper proposes a model that explains the utility of illus-trations in promoting text comprehension comprising two ef-fects, increasing motivation and deepening elaboration. We conducted two experiments using an existing evacuation man-ual to test the model. The first experiment confirmed that illus-trations did significantly increase the participants ’ motivation to read the manual text. The second revealed that the more the participants gazed at the illustrations, the better they rec-ognized the ones they actually had seen, and that the better the participants recognized the illustrations, the higher they re-called the text associated with the illustrations, possibly due to deeper elaboration of the text with the illustrations