Learning with Pictures and Accompanying Audio-Texts: Conflict Regulation, Narrative Processing, and Aesthetic Evaluation

Abstract

History paintings are a special form of pictures, as they can be used not only as historical documents, but also tell a story and are exhibited in galleries as artworks. However, history paintings often contain discrepancies between their depiction and reality that are frequently named in accompanying audio-texts. The aim of the present studies was to examine theories from three fields (picture as 1. historical document, 2. narrative, 3. artwork). These theories assume that naming of discrepancies between a picture and reality should affect the processing of the picture, the memory for content of the picture, and the evaluation of the picture. Study 1 showed that recipients fixated the content of the picture longer when it was named with discrepancies than without. This indicates that conflicts were recognized by the viewers. With regard to conflict regulation strategies, recipients did not process source information longer, nor did they report higher interest in further information when discrepancies were named than when discrepancies were not named. Thus, the results of Study 1 do not support neither sourcing nor information seeking as conflict regulation strategies of the recipients. In Study 2, recipients rated the trustworthiness of the picture document lower when discrepancies were named but not explained compared to when discrepancies were not named. As expected, explaining the discrepancies through the benevolent intentions of the artist compensated for the negative effect of naming discrepancies. This suggests that viewers used information about the source along with information about the content to evaluate the trustworthiness of the picture document. The recall of discrepant picture content was not better when discrepancies were named than without naming of discrepancies, but an exploratory analysis revealed that the recall of consistent pictorial content was worse when discrepancies were named. In Study 3, on the aesthetics of the picture, recipients did not rate their subjective understanding worse when discrepancies were named and not explained compared to when discrepancies were not named. However, aesthetic liking of the picture was significantly lower when discrepancies were named and not explained compared to not naming discrepancies at all. Moreover, as expected, this effect was compensated by an explanation of the discrepancies. There was neither an effect of discrepancies nor explanation on surprise, interest, and confusion. The results show that fluency is important for aesthetic liking. Studies 1,2,3 did not show consistent results on whether naming discrepancies has a negative effect on the viewers’ transportation. In Study 4, an audio text annotated two different picture documents about the same event. Discrepancies between the pictures were always named and differences in the artists' intentions were manipulated. Either artist’s were described with differences in benevolence (one with propagandistic intention and one with a documentary intention) or without difference in benevolence (either both with a propagandistic intention or both with no intentions at all) The results of Study 4 did not show that recipients engaged in more sourcing and less information seeking when the source information was useful for conflict regulation than when the source information was not useful for conflict regulation. The present work extends theories in the respective fields and serves a better understanding of the design of audio texts in museums.