News Concreteness and Visual-Verbal Association Do News Pictures Narrow the Recall Gap Between Concrete and Abstract News?

Abstract

In three experiments with difficult stimuli, it was found that the addition of a representative picture to a news item improves recall of that item. Second, as predicted by dual-coding theory (DCT), concrete news items were recalled better than abstract news items (Experiments 2 and 3). Furthermore, concrete news items benefited more from the addition of a news picture than did abstract news items (Experiment 3). In Experiment 4, it was found that news concreteness was strongly correlated with various picture attributes, including visual-verbal overlap, which might in part explain the differential gain in recall from the addition of pictures to concrete and abstract news. The results are explained using Paivio's DCT.