Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Learning occurs across distributed multimodal experiences. To accumulate knowledge one must integrate related infor-mation across different representational formats i.e. across text and photographs. We extended an established memoryintegration paradigm to test acquisition and integration of knowledge across different representational formats based onart history museum exhibits. Participants received integrable passage pairs in either text-text or text-text+photographformats. Even though the processing demands were higher with photographs, preliminary results indicate no significantdifferences between conditions. Future work will examine potential differences in integration across both context (class-room to museum) and representational formats (text and museum artifacts). We hypothesize that integration across contextand representational format will create higher cognitive demand than integration across representational formats; will thisbe offset by the higher information-value of museum exhibits? This research will provide key insights into multimodallearning and inform best practices for maximizing comprehension in informal learning settings such as museums.