We examined the role of mental imagery skills on story comprehension in 150 fifth graders (10- to 12-year-olds), when reading a narrative book chapter with alternating words and pictures (i.e., text blocks were alternated by one- or two-page picture spreads). A parallel group design was used, in which we compared our experimental book version, in which pictures were used to replace parts of the corresponding text, to two control versions, i.e., a text-only version and a version with the full story text and all pictures. Analyses showed an interaction between mental imagery and book version: children with higher mental imagery skills outperformed children with lower mental imagery skills on story comprehension after reading the experimental narrative. This was not the case for both control conditions. This suggests that children's mental imagery skills significantly contributed to the mental representation of the story that they created, by successfully integrating information from both words and pictures. The results emphasize the importance of mental imagery skills for explaining individual variability in reading development. Implications for educational practice are that we should find effective ways to instruct children how to "read" pictures and how to develop and use their mental imagery skills. This will probably contribute to their mental models and therefore their story comprehension.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 20. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 29 August 2024.
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#1,985,679
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#4,085
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#33,081
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Outputs of similar age from Frontiers in Psychology
#65
of 456 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 26,548,096 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 92nd percentile: it's in the top 10% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 35,490 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 13.9. This one has done well, scoring higher than 88% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 456 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 85% of its contemporaries.
