ANIMATIONS NEED NARRATIONS - AN EXPERIMENTAL TEST OF A DUAL-CODING HYPOTHESIS

In 2 experiments, mechanically naive college students viewed an animation depicting the operation of a bicycle tire pump that included a verbal description given before (words-before-pictures) or during (words-with-pictures) the animation. The words-with-pictures group outperformed the words-before-pictures group on tests of creative problem solving that involved reasoning about how the pump works. In a follow-up experiment, students in the words-with-pictures group performed better on the problem-solving test than students who saw the animation without words (pictures only), heard the words without the animation (words only), or received no training (control). Results support a dual-coding hypothesis (Paivio, 1990) that posits two kinds of connections: representational connections between verbal stimuli and verbal representations and between visual stimuli and visual representations and referential connections between visual and verbal representations.