Does Spatial or Visual Information in Maps Facilitate Text Recall? Reconsidering the Conjoint Retention Hypothesis

The conjoint retention hypothesis (CRH) claims that students recall more text information when they study geographic maps in addition to text than when they study text alone, because the maps are encoded spatially (Kulhavy, Lee, & Caterino, 1985). This claim was recently challenged by Grifin and...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inEducational technology research and development Vol. 53; no. 1; pp. 23 - 36
Main Authors Griffin, Marlynn M., Robinson, Daniel H.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Heidelberg Association for Educational Communications and Technology 01.01.2005
Springer
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Character maps
Circles
Coding
Education and psychology
Educational psychology
Educational sciences
Experiments
Familiarity
Geography
Hypothesis Testing
Information representations
Intellectual operations
Map skills
Memory
Memory recall
Nouns
Psychology and learning
Recall (Psychology)
Research Methodology
Retention (Psychology)
Short Term Memory
Spatial Ability
Theories
Undergraduate Students
Visual Stimuli
Vocabulary
Word Lists
Working memory
Space
Experimentation
Memorizing
Text
Information
Visual Presentation
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:The conjoint retention hypothesis (CRH) claims that students recall more text information when they study geographic maps in addition to text than when they study text alone, because the maps are encoded spatially (Kulhavy, Lee, & Caterino, 1985). This claim was recently challenged by Grifin and Robinson (2000), who found no advantage for maps over feature lists in facilitating text recall. In two experiments, we crossed maps and lists with icons and names (c.f., Griffin & Robinson), and employed materials and methodology very similar to those used in previous CRH studies by Kulhavy and colleagues (Kulhavy, Stock, Verdi, Rittschof, and Savenye, 1993; Stock, Kulhavy, Peterson, Hancock, & Verdi, 1995). In addition, we included a concurrent task to measure spatial encoding, as did Grifin and Robinson. No advantages were found for maps over lists in facilitating text recall, nor were maps processed in a more spatial manner than lists. Instead, it appears that the key stimulus feature for facilitating text recall is mimetic icons (i.e., icons that represent features) rather than the spatial characteristics of geographic maps, a finding that supports dual-coding theory (Paivio, 1986), but not the CRH.
ISSN:1042-1629
1556-6501
DOI:10.1007/BF02504855