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Pictures help people to comprehend and remember texts. We report two experiments designed to test among several accounts of this facilitation. Students read texts describing four-step procedures in which the middle steps were described as occurring at the same time, although the verbal description of the steps was sequential. A mental representation of the procedure would have the middle steps equally strongly related to the preceding and succeeding steps (because the middle steps are performed simultaneously), whereas a mental representation of the text would have the middle step that was described first more closely related to the preceding step than the middle step described second. After reading, strengths of the represented relationships between the steps were assessed. When the texts were accompanied by appropriate pictures, subjects tended to mentally represent the procedure. When the texts …