Presentation format effects in working memory: The role of attention

Abstract

Four experiments are reported in which participants attempted to remember three or six concrete nouns, presented as pictures, spoken words, or printed words, while also verifying the accuracy of sentences. Hypotheses meant to explain the higher recall of pictures and spoken words over printed words were tested. Increasing the difficulty and changing the type of processing task from arithmetic to a visual/ spatial reasoning task did not influence recall. An examination of long-term modality effects showed that those effects were not sufficient to explain the superior performance with spoken words and pictures. Only when we manipulated the allocation of attention to the items in the storage task by requiring the participants to articulate the items and by presenting the stimulus items under a degraded condition were we able to reduce or remove the effect of presentation format. The findings suggest that the better recall of pictures and spoken words over printed words result from the fact that under normal presentation conditions, printed words receive less processing attention than pictures and spoken words do.

Observational learning from animated models: Effects of modality and reflection on transfer

“…According to this view, accompanying complex visual materials with written explanations may result in too much load on the visual channel and thus to inferior processing of the instructional materials (Ginns, 2005;Mousavi, Low, & Sweller, 1995). Research focusing on attentional processing of text that has revealed that written text automatically receives less conscious attention than spoken text (Foos & Goolkasian, 2005). When learners are stimulated to attend to this information by mentally rehearsing or repeating the textual information, spoken text is no longer superior to written text.…”

“…Recently, Foos and Goolkasian (2005) found that participants who were prompted to effortful and attentional processing of written words performed equally on recall to participants receiving spoken words. In their experiments they enforced effortful and attentional processing by either presenting so-called degraded words (e.g., grey bars through the word) or by having participants mentally rehearse the words.…”

Presentation Format Effects in a Levels-of-Processing Task

“…Although the effect of presentation format has had a long and rich research history, it is somewhat fragmented: and as a result, there are few general principles that psychological science can offer as a guide for efficient processing of stimulus information. The present research integrates previous work with picture/word (e.g., Kosslyn, 1980;Paivio, 1975) and auditory/visual (e.g., Greene, 1985;Penney, 1989) comparisons by exploring why printed words are not recalled as well as other presentation formats (e.g., pictures and spoken words) (Foos & Goolkasian, 2005;Goolkasian & Foos, 2002). Three experiments extend the investigation of format effects beyond encoding processes and working memory by using a levels of processing (LoP) approach (e.g., Craik & Lockhart, 1972) to examine whether effects of presentation format remain in long-term memory even after participants have encoded the stimulus items to the same levels.…”

“…According to the attention allocation hypothesis (Foos & Goolkasian, 2005) printed words are at somewhat of a disadvantage because of attenuated conscious processing. If we control the processing level we control the amount of conscious encoding and might therefore eliminate format effects in retrieval from longterm memory.…”

Reduction and Elimination of Format Effects on Recall

“…The present research integrates previous work with picture-word (Kosslyn, 1980;Paivio, 1975) and auditory-visual (Greene, 1985;Penney, 1989) comparisons by exploring why printed words are not recalled as well as other presentation formats (e.g., pictures and spoken words) (Foos & Goolkasian, 2005;Goolkasian & Foos, 2002). The experiments manipulate variables that are known to have an influence on the ease or difficulty of processing words to explore whether they could be effective at reducing or eliminating the recall disadvantage associated with printed words when a working memory task is studied.…”