When
we’re young we get picture books, and if we’re lucky someone will read the
words until we have learned to read ourselves. As we get older, our books have
fewer pictures and we have to more and more rely on our imagination to
“picture” the scene.
This
doesn’t mean that we don’t like pictures, but our stories have become too
complicated to have many pictures. It is interesting how the words and pictures
work on each other. Vandeberg et al
have published a study in PLoS ONE exploring some of these aspects (1).
In
some of their experiments they showed a picture briefly and then had their
participants read a short story that mentioned the object. Here is the twist.
In some of the stories the object was reported as being present and in others
it was reported as being absent. After reading the story the participants were
shown two versions of the image one being more transparent than the other. Note
that the initial picture had a transparency of 50%.
In
the case of the stories in which the objects were said to be present, the
participants chose the more opaque picture as being most like the one seen
before the story. Whereas when the story mentioned that the object was not
present, the choices switched to the more transparent picture of the two shown
at the end.
So
it seems that mentioning that something is around in a story gives us a
stronger image of that object than if the story mentions that it wasn’t there.
This is a very interesting cognitive result. For example, if someone tells me
that they saw a unicorn in my garden this morning, I will have a stronger
picture of a unicorn eating my roses than if they had said that there was no
unicorn in my garden.
I
will be watching out for the technique in the fairy stories in the political
advertisements this summer. If they tell me it’s true maybe I’ll see the utopia
– picture perfect.
