Multimedia learning: how does viewing just a relevant picture impact memory of a lecture?

Abstract

Effective presentations are important in many domains. The cognitive theory of multimedia learning (CTML; Mayer, 2022a) identifies important assumptions and principles for giving such presentations. However, lecturers may not always consider/know these guidelines when creating slides. Some of the most subjectively compelling presentations (e.g., TED Talks) include decks of slides with only pictures to accompany a spoken message. CTML contradicts this approach, predicting that learning should improve with pictures that accompany text. Two pilot studies provided evidence that presenting pictures alone may be harmful to learning and similar to receiving a purely auditory lecture. In particular, participants showed a deficit in factual learning when seeing picture alone to accompany an auditory lecture. The current study sought to understand why this effect occurred. Participants viewed a short, recorded lecture with either just pictures or pictures and text on the accompanying slides and took notes while they watched the lecture. Their notes were evaluated to determine what information they attended to and encoded. The current study did not replicate overall memory performance differences shown by the previous two pilot studies, but did show a similar pattern for factual learning deficits in a pictures-only condition. Additionally, few important differences in note-taking behavior occurred, indicating little difference in note-taking strategies between groups. Future work should continue to compare learning under varying lecture, note-taking, and examination conditions.