Multiple documents of text and picture: Naming a historical painting’s inaccuracies influences conflict regulation strategies

Abstract Referring to theories of multiple documents and narrative processing, two experiments investigated how viewers process pairs of documents about historical events, namely, historical paintings together with audio-texts either naming or not naming historical inaccuracies in the paintings. The results of Experiment 1 revealed that participants encountering discrepancies allocated more attention to the pictorial element, compared to participants without discrepancies, but not to the source label containing information about the artist. Participants in the two conditions reported an equal amount of interest in receiving further information and did not differ with regard to the retention of pictorial elements. In Experiment 2, participants rated the painting’s trustworthiness lower with discrepancies named than without, and this effect was compensated by an explanation for the discrepancy. Retention of the manipulated pictorial elements was not affected by either presenting these elements as discrepant or not, but an explorative analysis indicated that the pictorial elements presented always as consistent were remembered worse with discrepancies named. In Experiment 1, the reported transportation into the historical narrative was lower with compared to without discrepancies named, but we could not replicate this effect in Experiment 2. Our results extend multiple documents literature on multiple documents of text and picture.