Encoding and retaining information in the visuals and verbals of an educational movie

This study shows that when viewers watching an educational movie are presented simultaneously with information in two media-visual and verbal /auditory, there is no competition fa resources. When encoding information in one medium, one is not hindered from encoding information in the other; even when visual and linguistic information are presented sequentially, doubling study time, the extraction of information is not increased. College students appear to be good dual media processors. This work was supported by the Office of Naval Research, Contract #N00014-78-C0433, and National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral fellowship #5 F32 MH07588-02, to the first author. Some of the results were presented at the 1980 annual meeting of the Psychonomics Society in St. Louis. We thank Agda Bearden for helping with data collection and scoring and R. Michael Perry for implementing the computer package for data analysis. Requests for reprints should be sent to Patricia Baggett, Psychology Department, University of Colorado, Campus Box 345, Boulder, Colorado, 80309. This report is #108 of the Institute of Cognitive Science’s Technical Report Series.