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The Picture Superiority Effect

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The Picture Superiority Effect
Abstract:
Participants were split into two groups and each group took part in a different condition of the study. One group looked at images and the other group looked at words. There was a visuospatial task and then the participants had to recall as much of the stimuli they were assigned to as possible. Results proved to be as expected; that participants remembered images much more than they remembered words. However there were some issues with the study which were analysed in the discussion section. Introduction:
The aim of this experiment was to find out whether people were more able to recall pictures or words more after seeing them for a very short amount of time. There have been many experiments into the picture superiority effect. It is said that “free verbal recall is generally higher for items presented as pictures than for items presented as words.” (Paivio and Csapo) This study sets out to test that theory – but with a visuospatial task added in between seeing the stimuli and the recall. This is in order to test whether people recall words or images better after a period of distraction. s. In a study by (Paivio 1991) he claimed that pictures have the advantage over words because they are amenable to semantic encoding through two different routes whereas words are processed only through a verbal pathway. This study suggests images will be superior in people’s memories to words as they have more ways of being memorised by the human brain than words do. There are many studies which support the fact that pictures are recalled more easily and more frequently than words. However it may be the case that words still may be better recalled than images potentially due to whether or not the participants “self-talk.” (Winsler & Naglieri, 2003) found that children begin to “self-talk” and this coincided with language development. This phenomenon affected children having a higher “failure to name rate” than adults in previous studies – but if teenagers “self-talk” also then they may name the pictures from their own perspective and thus have a low recall but this is not possible with words. So words may be recalled better. The experimental hypothesis was: The number of words recalled correctly by the images group will be significantly greater than the number of word pairs recalled by the no images group (1>2). The study was expected to reveal that the recall of images would be much higher than the recall of words.
Method:

Participants:
All participants within the study were first year practical psychology students ranging from the ages of 17 to 22 took part in the study. The participants who took part were twelve females and only four males.

Materials:
The materials used in this experiment were: two computers – to display the PowerPoint presentations and a spot the difference visuospatial task (also on the computers), two consent and two debrief forms – one for each part of the task that participants would be taking part in - and 2 pens used for signing the forms.

Design:
The experiment used a between-subjects design. The independent variable was whether participants were shown the images or the words. The dependent variables were: the time participants got to look at either the images or words, and the visuospatial task they were given, and they used the same PowerPoint set-ups.

Procedure:
First of all the participants signed their consent forms – agreeing to take part in the experiment there were two conditions of the experiment and participants were randomly assigned to each one. The participants took part in each condition simultaneously. One group looked at a PowerPoint of pictures with a blank slide between each picture and the other group looked at a PowerPoint of the words instead of pictures. The pictures and words were in same order on both PowerPoints. The participants had 2 seconds to try to memorise the pictures/words with a 2 second break between each and then they had a spot the difference task before they attempted to recall the pictures/words they had seen. Lastly they were given a debrief form to sign, and thanked for their participation.

Results:
The results of experiment were as follows:
Participants did recall images better than they recalled words. This supports the hypothesis. The graphs below show the figures for words and images recall:

Words:
Mean:
7
Median
7.5
Standard Deviation:
3.51

Images:
Mean:
9
Median:
9
Standard Deviation
1.98

Discussion:
Even though the results support our hypothesis the study itself was flawed in many ways which could affect the generality of the experiment such as the gender differences.

There was a very unequal female to male ration in this study with there being 12 females and only 4 males. This affects the validity of the study in its ability to be generalised to bigger populations because it may be the case that females recall images more than words whereas males recall words better than images. There was not wide enough variety of males and females to ascertain whether or not this is the case or whether it is the same for both genders. There may need to be further studies taken to see whether this is the case or not.

The study may also be invalid because of the ages of the participants. All participants within the study were university students ranging from the ages of 17-22 years old. This affects the experiment’s ability to be generalised to the public because it may be the case again that different age groups of people recall the different stimuli better than others. For example middle aged people may recall words better than images and in elderly people there may be no differentiation between the two at all. This is also an extremely small sample size of the population to be testing – the results would be more accurate if the people surveyed was more diverse and more in population. This argument is backed up by a study by (Defeyter, Russo, and McPartlin 2009). They did a study into whether the picture superiority effect was affected by the developmental process. They found this to be true. There were two conditions for their study and in condition one: participants had ample response time and a significant picture superiority effect appeared in all but the youngest group. In condition two: with short response time, a significant picture superiority effect appeared only among 11- and 20-year-old groups, while a significant reverse of the picture superiority effect was detected in the youngest group. This study shows that there are clear differences in the picture superiority effect depending on the age of participants – thus our study is invalid in for the general population as it only tested a small age range of teenagers to young twenty-something year olds.

The results of our study may not be valid in the fact that the participants may have been employing the use of memory tricks when doing the study. This is when participants only vaguely remember the first letter of the word they are trying to recall and then guess the answer. It could be the case that participants were simply guessing the answers as they could not remember them effectively after such a short period of time and it was just luck that images were remembered more easily than words.

The results of the experiment will also have been affected by the fact that the only participants who took part were the classmates of those researching. Thus, they already knew everything about the study. This will most definitely have affected the results of the study because the participants are more likely to remember the words and images within the study, thus rendering the study invalid.

Conclusion:
Overall the results supported the hypothesis and confirmed that participants are indeed able to recall words better than they are able to recall images. But there needs to be further experiments done to determine whether this hypothesis can be generalised to the population. Future studies should focus especially on age differences, and gender differences in relation to levels of recall.

References: http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2007/04/the_picture_sup.html http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6W47-4WRD66M-1&_user=10&_coverDate=09%2F30%2F2009&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=gateway&_origin=gateway&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1680276214&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=0e943be320cdd6e8404edbffdc19dcbe&searchtype=a

(Piavio and Csapo)

Whitehouse et al. British Journal of Developmental Psychology (2006), 24, 767–773

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