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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 4, 2026

Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects

Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects

Published on: November 30, 2018

Pictures and words in visual search.

A Paivio¹, I Begg

¹Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, N6A 3K7, London, Ontario, Canada.

Memory & Cognition

|January 29, 2011

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Searching for visual information is faster using pictures than words. This study suggests that dual-coding theory explains how we process and search for information presented in different formats.

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Human Perception
Information Processing

Background:

Understanding how humans search for and retrieve information is crucial in cognitive psychology.
Previous research has explored the differences in processing visual and verbal stimuli.
The dual-coding theory proposes that information is processed through both verbal and non-verbal (imaginal) channels.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the effect of stimulus modality (pictures vs. words) on visual search speed.
To examine how target modality interacts with array modality in visual search tasks.
To test the applicability of the dual-coding theory to visual search behavior.

Main Methods:

Participants performed visual search tasks across three experiments.
Stimuli included line drawings of objects, printed words, photographs of faces, and printed names.
Search times were recorded for different combinations of target and array item modalities.

Main Results:

In Experiments I and II, search was faster with pictures than words in the array, irrespective of target modality.
Picture targets were searched faster than word targets when the array also contained pictures.
Experiment III showed significantly slower search times when names were targets within an array of faces.

Conclusions:

Results support the dual-coding theory, indicating that information processed both verbally and imaginally can be accessed in either mode.
The efficiency of search depends on the cognitive representation and the modality of the search array.
Task demands, specifically the format of the search array, dictate whether verbal or non-verbal processing is prioritized.