[reading images]

An interesting article on the reading (as in interpreting) of images and development of point of view. If the image appears alongside a narrative, people will wait to read the whole story before coming to any conclusions. If, however, the image appears with a list of information (rather than a narrative), people are quicker to form conclusions, basing their opinion more on the image rather than the verbal description. This has pedagogical and new media theory implications (among others).

"As our results indicate, pictures can have directionally opposite eVects on the impact of the verbal information they accompany, depending on whether this information is conveyed in a narrative or a list. These diVerences are largely traceable to the inXuence of pictures on the processes that individuals use to compute a judgment and the representations that are formed. When the information about a person describes a sequence of temporally related events, participants with the goal of forming an impression of the person are unlikely to compute an evaluation of the protagonist until the entire sequence is complete. Pictures provide perceptual symbols that both facilitate the formation of images of the individual events and permit the events to be perceptually linked, thereby leading a more coherent mental representation of the information to be constructed. When the information is conveyed in a list, however, participants attempt to form an evaluation of the protagonist on line by integrating the implications of the individual events as they encounter them, updating their impression as each new event is received. When pictures accompany the event descriptions, however, they appear to interfere with this integration process, resulting in a decrease in the impact of the descriptions. This interference largely occurs when pictures directly accompany the verbal information. Thus, as indicated by the supplementary data obtained in Experiment 2, presenting pictures separately from the verbal event descriptions had similar effects on participants’ evaluations regardless of the format in which the verbal material was presented.

Experiments 3 and 4 provided more direct indications of the processes and representations that underlie the judgments we observed in earlier studies. Experiment 3, for example, indicates that pictures are recognized both more quickly and more accurately when they are conveyed in a narrative than when they are conveyed in a list. Furthermore, verbal descriptions were also identified more accurately in the former condition, whereas the time required to make these identiWcations was longer. This latter effect is consistent with other evidence that when the features of information are represented in memory in a temporally related sequence, people engage in a mental search of the representation in order to identify these features, and the required time to do so is a reflection of this search.

Experiment 4 confrmed these implications and the nature of the representation formed more generally, showing that when event information is presented in a narrative
and, therefore, stored in memory as a temporally related sequence, exposure to one event description increases the speed of identifying the event that immediately follows it in the sequence. This eVect is not evident when the events are simply listed. Further results from this experiment indicate that pictures increased the time to identify statements when they were contained in a list but not when they were conveyed in a narrative. These results further strengthen the assumption that pictures interfered with the processing of the verbal information they accompanied."

"The impact of pictures on narrative- and list-based impression formation: A process interference model, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 43, Issue 3, May 2007, Pages 352-364
Rashmi Adaval, Linda M. Isbell and Jr., Robert S. Wyer"