Visual mnemonics for language learning: Static pictures versus animated morphs.

Abstract

The literature on learning with animations has focused so far on subject matters in which changes over time depicted in the animation are mapped onto changes over time in the reality of the concepts to be learned. The experiments presented in this article, however, suggest that also a nontemporal mapping of facts, as in paired-associate learning with visual mnemonics, can profit from temporally changing displays. In 2 experiments, Sino-Japanese characters and their meanings were learned with either static pictures or animated morphs as visual encoding mnemonics. The results show that both types of encoding mnemonics improved paired-associate learning compared to a nonmnemonic control group. The positive effects of encoding mnemonics remained stable over a period of 1 week. Experiment 1 showed a superiority of static pictures over animated morphs. However, this effect disappeared when the relative length of presentation time of characters and pictures in both static and animated mnemonic conditions was held constant (Experiment 2). Furthermore, how good a character's visual shape represents its associated meaning seems to be a powerful predictor of learning, regardless of learning method. The results are interpreted in terms of task-appropriate mental representations resulting from static and animated mnemonics, in particular the availability and the extractability of cues in a visual display.