RESUMEN
Various studies have demonstrated an advantage of auditory over visual text modality when learning with texts and pictures. To explain this modality effect, two complementary assumptions are proposed by cognitive theories of multimedia learning: first, the visuospatial load hypothesis, which explains the modality effect in terms of visuospatial working memory overload in the visual text condition; and second, the temporal contiguity assumption, according to which the modality effect occurs because solely auditory texts and pictures can be attended to simultaneously. The latter explanation applies only to simultaneous presentation, the former to both simultaneous and sequential presentation. This paper introduces a third explanation, according to which parts of the modality effect are due to early, sensory processes. This account predicts that-for texts longer than one sentence-the modality effect with sequential presentation is restricted to the information presented most recently. Two multimedia experiments tested the influence of text modality across three different conditions: simultaneous presentation of texts and pictures versus sequential presentation versus presentation of text only. Text comprehension and picture recognition served as dependent variables. An advantage for auditory texts was restricted to the most recent text information and occurred under all presentation conditions. With picture recognition, the modality effect was restricted to the simultaneous condition. These findings clearly support the idea that the modality effect can be attributed to early processes in perception and sensory memory rather than to a working memory bottleneck.
Asunto(s)
Percepción Auditiva/fisiología , Aprendizaje/fisiología , Multimedia , Percepción Visual/fisiología , Femenino , Humanos , Masculino , Memoria a Corto Plazo/fisiología , Percepción Espacial/fisiologíaRESUMEN
In the context of text recall it is often stated that surface representations are quickly forgotten. Jarvella (1971) and Sachs (1967) argued that what is retained beyond sentence boundaries is meaning information, whereas lexical and syntactic information is only available for the most recent constituent. We based a text recall experiment on Jarvella's paradigm, in order to demonstrate that both meaning and grammatical gender information contribute to the recall of short text passages. Although it is known that grammatical gender information is used in anaphor resolution, even if noun and pronoun do not belong to adjacent sentences, there is no direct evidence for a gender contribution to text memory so far. The present experiment demonstrates that grammatical gender information, even when of no semantic importance, is retained beyond sentence boundaries and can contribute to the memory representation of subsequent text. All materials and additional statistics may be downloaded from mc.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.
Asunto(s)
Comprensión , Lenguaje , Lingüística , Memoria a Corto Plazo , Lectura , Semántica , Aprendizaje Verbal , Atención , Humanos , Factores SexualesRESUMEN
The model of aging that people construct influences interpretations of and responses to actual situations when they occur, as well as preparatory actions that people take. Thus the question of what people foresee for themselves and the process by which they construct and revise this subjective aging trajectory has implications for such issues as health behavior, retirement planning, migration and residential moves, and advance directives, as well as for overall well-being in old age. This exploratory, hypothesis-generating study found that informants referred frequently to the course of aging and the events they envisioned in their own futures. The analysis delineates 1) types of events that older people see as part of aging in general and their own aging in particular, 2) factors and processes that enter into the construction of the subjective trajectory of aging, and 3) feeling and behavioral responses to the imagined future.