April 2009 - June 2013
Pact for Research and Innovation of the Competition Fund of the Leibniz-Association
This PhD project aimed at investigating whether there is early mutual interplay between processing of text and processing of pictures when learning with multimedia. Against the backdrop of research on cognitive psychology it was assumed that processing of a picture, even for a short time only, allows extracting global spatial information that, in turn, is useful to learning from text. Results from five experiments with eye movement recordings supported the assumption global spatial information is processed early in a picture and, in turn, can be used to foster learning from text. Results were thus in line with the notion of early mutual interplay in text and picture processing when learning with multimedia.