Why Do Illustrations Promote Text Comprehension? Motivation Effect and Elaboration Effect

This paper proposes a model that explains the utility of illustrations in promoting text comprehension comprising two effects, increasing motivation and deepening elaboration. We conducted two experiments using an existing evacuation manual to test the model. The first experiment confirmed that illustrations did significantly increase the participants’ motivation to read the manual text. The second revealed that the more the participants gazed at the illustrations, the better they recognized the ones they actually had seen, and that the better the participants recognized the illustrations, the higher they recalled the text associated with the illustrations, possibly due to deeper elaboration of the text with the illustrations.