Over Christmas break I had some free time and read the book, 'BRAIN RULES: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School' by John Medina. This book is full of documentation on how the brain processes information. I found many interesting passages that support our unique method at READable PHONICS of teaching children how to learn phonics through pictorial-action phonogram cards.
Here are some passages on how we learn with pictures and pictorial representations:
"RULE #10 VISION TRUMPS ALL OTHER SENSES"
"When it comes to memory, researchers have known for more than 100 years that pictures and text follow very different rules. Put simply, the more visual the input becomes, the more likely it is to be recognized - and recalled. The phenomenon is so pervasive, it has been given its own name: the pictorial superiority effect, or PSE.
"Human PSE is truly Olympian. Tests performed years ago showed that people could remember more than 2,500 pictures with at least 90 percent accuracy several days post-exposure, even though subjects saw each picture for about 10 seconds. Accuracy rates a year later still hovered around 63 percent."
"Text and oral presentations are not just less efficient than pictures for retaining certain types of information; they are way less efficient. If information is presented orally, people remember about 10 percent, tested 72 hours after exposure. That figure goes up to 65 percent if you add a picture."
"...babies come with a variety of preloaded software devoted to visual processing."
"Babies display a preference for patterns with high contrast...They can discriminate human faces from non-human equivalents and seem to prefer them."
"Whether looking at behavior, cells, or genes, we can observe how important visual sense is to the human experience. Striding across our brain like an out-of-control superpower, giant swaths of biological resource are consumed by it."
"Educators should know how pictures transfer information. There are things we know about how pictures grab attention that are rock solid. We pay lots of attention to color. We pay lots of attention to orientation. We pay lots of attention to size. And we pay special attention if the object is still in motion."
"...pictorial information may be initially more attractive to consumers, in part because it takes less effort to comprehend. ...it is also a more efficient way to glue information to a neuron..."
"The initial effect of pictures on attention has been tested. Using infrared eye-tracking technology, 3,600 consumers were tested on 1,363 print advertisements. The conclusion? Pictorial information was superior in capturing attention - independent of its size. Even if the picture was small and crowded with lots of other non-pictorial elements close to it, the eye went to the visual."
