Student Research Report: Do Pictures Make a Difference?
In Spring 2022, students in Dr. Emily Stark’s Research Methods and Design course completed multiple hands-on data collection projects. They were also assigned a blog paper where they discussed one of the topics they chose to research and explained their findings to a general audience. The goal of this assignment was to give students an opportunity to explore a different form of writing from APA-style research papers. Some of these blog papers will be featured here to showcase the students’ findings. Please feel free to contact Dr. Stark through the contact form on this site for additional information about this course or the assignments used.
By Sadie Schulz
Have you ever noticed that it seems to be easier to remember the things that you have seen, rather than words you have read on a page? If you're anything like me, you can easily recall what your favorite meal looks like but can hardly remember a line from your favorite book. Can the medium in which you receive a subject really change how well you remember it? Rajaram (1996) conducted a study to determine whether there was a difference in memory between words and pictures across different tests. Throughout the conducted experiments, they found that people's ability to remember a stimulus was significantly higher when they were presented with a picture to study, as opposed to a word.
Bainbridge (2017) also wrote an article detailing the connections between pictures and memory, discussing different theories and studies put forth throughout the years confirming the connection between the two. They discuss the picture superiority effect, which is the phenomenon in which people are better at remembering images than they are at remembering words, and how it pertains to theories such as the dual-coding theory. This theory suggests that pictures allow for dual coding, which means that by studying a picture you are able to store both the image code and the word code. They also discuss how the picture superiority effect is affected by age, stating that the closer a child gets to adolescence the more pronounced the effect becomes until hitting a plateau in later adulthood.
I wanted to see if those same results would still hold true on a smaller scale, as well as test to see if the gender of the participants made a difference in the amount that they remembered. For my Research methods and design class, I decided to create an experiment that could test both of those things. I had 8 participants in my experiment, 4 of them being men and 4 of them being women. I began by creating two different PowerPoints both having the same 10 subjects but alternating the 5 that were used as words and the 5 that were used as pictures. For example, the first PowerPoint had the word rake on it and a picture of an egg, while the second PowerPoint had a picture of a rake on it while having the word egg. Each participant looked at one of the PowerPoints, looking at each subject on the PowerPoint for 5 seconds, and asked to commit each slide to memory as best as they could. They recorded as many subjects as they could remember on a piece of paper.
After recording the number of words that my participants could remember, I ran statistical tests. Ultimately, my results showed that the gender of the participant did not have a significant effect on the number of words that were remembered, but that the way the subject was presented to the participants had a significant effect. In this case, the effect that the pictures on the PowerPoint were remembered significantly more than the words were remembered. While there were limitations to my study, such as a small number of people being tested, these results are still important to understand because it shows that these theories can hold true for people from all walks of life. This information could be beneficial for so many people, whether it's college students studying for a test or a server trying to remember an order, knowing your brain and how it works best can be a person’s secret weapon.
References
Bainbridge, E. (2017, April 16). Are pictures really worth a thousand words? When it comes to memory they are. CogBlog- A Cognitive Psychology Blog. Retrieved from https://web.colby.edu/cogblog/2017/04/16/are-pictures-really-worth-a-thousand-words/
Rajaram. (1996). Perceptual Effects on Remembering: Recollective Processes in Picture Recognition Memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 22(2), 365–377. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.22.2.365