ABSTRACT
The model focuses on the integration of words and pictures, but the words can be either heard or read depending on the instructional design. The spatial contiguity principle corresponds to Sweller's split attention effect-students learn better when words and pictures are near each other. However, for people with sight, equations might serve the same role as pictures and be displayed visually on the screen while an audio narrative describes important features of the equation. Mayer developed his multimedia model to study the integration of words and pictures. Instructions to assemble a toy or a piece of furniture, for instance, typically contain both words and pictures that we mentally combine to complete the task successfully. The problem with the original model was that there is no place to combine the visual and phonological information. In fact, most research on working memory was directed at identifying the independent contributions of space and speech in reasoning.
