The Implementation of Mind Maps and Virtual Story Telling to Enhance Case Understanding

Legal jargon creates a systemic barrier to justice, but empirical evidence for visual remedies is lacking. Charrow & Charrow (1979), present the idea that conceptual complexity, not just vocabulary, prevents comprehension. While the visual “visual law” movement proposes access structures like mind maps and diagrams, their efficacy for non-experts remains untested. Mind maps and virtual storytelling have shown promise when implemented in educational settings. Both visual aids implement an "access structure,” combining visual cues and text. This facilitates higher retention and understanding. These aides have not been tested for effectiveness and retention in the legal setting, addressing a gap. The current study investigated which visual aid —an interactive mind map of a virtual storytelling video—best enhances legal understanding for lay people compared to text alone. It was hypothesized that the multisensory video would optimize retention. To test this, the case Leonard v. Pepsico was presented to 90 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers with no legal background, verified with a pre-survey. The case was presented in 3 formats: text-only, text-with-mindmap, or text-with-video. Comprehension was measured using a 15-question mixed-methods survey. A one-way ANOVA revealed a statistically significant effect of format, F(2,86)=128.10, p< .001. Post-hoc Tukey HSD tests confirmed all pairwise differences with p