In my last post, I reviewed echoic and iconic memory, which are types of sensory memories that are modality based (much like the VARK theory). For more on that, click here. Baddeley also discusses the visual modality extensively when examining how memories are organized and encoded.
When forming a memory, the way it is organized seems to matter. For example, words arranged in meaningful chunks are easier to remember than words that are not arranged in such meaningful chunks. This can be done with letters too (as well as many other things). For example, to remember ILO VEV ARK in order is not too easy. Granted, with only nine letters there, it isn’t too difficult either. But if you notice that the spaces between those letters can be slightly rearranged to give I LOVE VARK. This arrangement is much easier to remember. So, how something is organized seems to matter for whether or not you will remember it (or at least for how easy it will be to remember it).
Visual imagery is one technique for organizing information that many people find useful. When given a list of words to memorize, visualizing the items in the list related in some way or another can help with memorizing them. According to Baddeley:
“Suppose you were trying to associate two unrelated words like rabbit and steeple, so that whenever one of the words is given you can come up with the other. A good strategy to achieve this is to imagine a rabbit and a steeple interacting in some way; you might for example imagine a rabbit clinging to the top of a steeple. It does not matter how unlikely or strange the image is, provided the two components interact to form a single unitary image; imagining the rabbit and steeple side by side will not be a very helpful example. Having created an interactive image you will find that if you are prompted with one word of the pair the other will pop up.”
How does this relate to VARK theory? Notice that in the example used above, how the words steeple and rabbit were presented to the learner is irrelevant. Visual imagery is more about what the learner does with the words after the fact. Once they have been presented, visual imagery is a way to take information that can be visualized and to try and remember it better. More explicitly, it doesn’t matter if I were to present to you pictures of what I want you to learn (in the visual modality), written words of what I want you to learn (in the reader modality), spoken words of what I want you to learn (in the auditory modality), or real life three dimensional things that I want you to learn (kinesthetic modality). According to Baddeley’s discussion of visual imagery, how they are presented does not matter. Visual imagery is a tool to use afterwards.
Baddeley goes on to discuss an interesting experiment that was conducted with chess players. After setting up chess board pieces in a specific position, the experimenter allowed chess masters and average chess players five-second glimpses at the board. Then they had to replicate where each piece was on the board (deGroot (1966) as cited in Baddeley (1984). Who did better in this experiment? According to Baddeley, “the masters were correctly placing 90 percent of the pieces after a single five-second glance, whereas the weak players were able to position only 40 percent of the pieces correctly after one glimpse, and needed five glimpses before they could equal the initial performance of the masters.”
Does this provide evidence for a visual modality preference? After all, five-second chess board glimpses would heavily rely on the visual modality. According to the experimenters, the chess masters did not have superior visual processing abilities. Instead “De Groot argued from this and a number of other experiments that the advantage enjoyed by the masters stemmed from their ability to perceive the chess board as an organized whole, rather than as a collection of individual pieces.”
So, as with sensory memory, visual imagery does not seem to provide evidence for VARK learning style theories. Look for posts on semantic and working memory in the upcoming weeks.
References
Baddeley, A. (1984). Your Memory: A User’s Guide, England: Penguin.
