Unraveling Coherence: The Impact of Image-Relatedness in Concept Learning

The coherence principle suggests removing unnecessary—or seductive—content from educational texts to reduce cognitive load. However, the binary proposition that all seductive details should be excluded neglects images' potential to prime semantically related concepts, which makes texts easier to process. It was hypothesized that this priming would cause at least tangentially related images to enhance processing and recall of concepts. Participants learned 24 concepts under four conditions: direct depictions, tangentially related and unrelated images, and no image. Participants' fixation durations on concepts, their complementing sentences and images, and recall performance were measured. Multilevel models revealed that coherence effects were only present for unrelated images and that images that are at least tangentially related facilitated learning. These effects were unaffected by participants' familiarity with concepts. The study concludes that semantically related images may outweigh their cognitive load, suggesting that educators should consider their priming potential when designing instructional materials.