UNDERSTANDING AND REMEMBERING COMPLEX PROSE AUGMENTED BY ANALOGIC AND PICTORIAL ILLUSTRATION

An experiment compared readers ' use of analogic and pictorial illustrations for understanding and remembering complex instructional text. High school students (N = 102) read procedural texts under six analogic and pictorial il-lustration conditions and attempted to apply the texts ' content in an applied performance task. Two weeks later students were evaluated on their attempts to perform the same task from memory. Pictures proved helpful for both im-mediate performance and delayed performance. Analogy was helpful for delayed performance but only slightly more helpful on immediate perfor-mance. Results are discussed in terms of apparent functions of analogies and pictures. To comprehend texts and learn from them, effective readers deploy the images they generate in reading with some deliberation, resorting to a number of strategies for increasing the meaning of the content and for remembering it as they find it necessary. By organizing images produced in response to a text, readers can create fictions to help them understand the text's content. These may take the form of direct or symbolic fictions and may turn upon highly im-aginative creations which sometimes personify what is not human, sometimes animate the inanimate (cf. Gordon, 1961; Khatena, 1983). The fictions readers image occur primarily as incipient visual representations (Iser, 1972, Kosslyn, 1980; Sless, 1981). To form a fiction, readers structure images so that they cor