Dr. Namyeon Lee, an assistant professor who joined the UNCP Department of Mass Communication this semester, has published the results of an experiment that tested news articles against infographics for conveying information about genetically modified food.
Informational graphics, or infographics, are visual presentations that combine text with charts, diagrams, icons, or similar graphic design elements to make a few main points quickly and, hopefully, clearly.
The study, co-authored with Dr. Sungkyoung Lee (no relation) at the University of Missouri, was recently published in the journal Public Understanding of Science. The 280 participants in this online experiment tended to remember information better, generate more message-relevant thoughts, and develop more favorable attitudes toward GM food if they read the science news in infographics, compared to conventional text-only news.
The article is titled “Visualizing Science: The Impact of Infographics on Free Recall, Elaboration, and Attitude Change for Genetically Modified Foods News.” It adopted the dual coding theory, which attempts to explain how audiences make referential connections between verbal and non-verbal representations and ultimately process corresponding words and pictures twice. That’s the “dual coding.”
Researchers in many fields, including education, have long studied the impact of visuals added to text. Dr. Lee’s research is concerned more specifically with attitude change towards GM foods and the extent to which audiences work out issue-relevant arguments intrapersonally–a type of mental work known as elaboration–on the news articles.
“Cognitive elaboration is especially important in science communication messages, because higher elaboration means that the audience is making some meaningful connections between previous knowledge and new information that they are reading,” Lee said. “In other words, they are engaging with the science news. Also, studies have shown that increased elaboration leads to more information searching.”
Dr. Lee’s study tested newspaper-style articles in the text-based experimental condition rather than educational materials per se.
“The lay public wants or needs to understand scientific findings. We encourage professional communicators working on behalf of the scientific community to share with those audiences in an accessible way, such as infographics,” she added.
Dr. Lee is currently working on a research study about the impact of message framing and visual types (infographics vs. photos) on COVID-19 vaccination communication messages, hoping to improve attitudes towards the vaccine and increase the intention to get the vaccine among general audiences.