Contextual and Motivational CUE Effects on the Comprehension and Recall of Prose

Abstract

6 groups of 20 subjects were each presented different introductory material (appropriate context picture; partial context picture; no picture; character-motivation story; no story) in a 3 × 2 design to assess effects on the comprehension and recall of a prose passage. Both the pictures and the story increased the ratings of comprehension, but only the pictures increased performance at recall. It was concluded that for a difficult prose passage, only a contextual schema would provide additional cues for retrieval and that two different schemata have no advantage over a single one.