Conjoint retention of maps and related discourse

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Abstract

Two experiments used fifth-grade students to test the hypothesis that conjointly presented verbal/spatial information facilitates retrieval from either stimulus format. In Experiment 1, subjects wrote either a geographical description or sensible narrative about a simple reference map. As predicted by conjoint retention, the narrative writers remembered significantly more of the map than their geographic counterparts. In Experiment 2, subjects either wrote or drew a rendition of the map or of a normed geographic description of its content. Subjects then listened to a short story about events occurring in the map space while they studied their rendition. Regardless of whether they wrote or drew, learners who viewed the map itself recalled significantly more discourse events, and event recall was dependent on whether the subject reported remembering associated geographic features and was able to produce the features on the test. These results support the notion of conjoint retention which assumes that related verbal/spatial arrays are stored in a fashion which allows separate use of both formats during retrieval.

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