Picture-text relations in multimodal first-aid instructions and the various nuances of meaning they can jointly produce have been the subject of assessment in numerous studies (e.g., Van der Sluis, Vergeer, & Redeker, 2018; Van der Sluis et al., 2022; Wildfeuer et al., 2023). In our current exploration, we specifically focus on the pictorial aspect of these instructions, particularly on the portrayal of help givers in first-aid guidance materials. Recognizing that these instructional materials can be presented in different formats (for instance, as drawings or photographs, in colour or monochrome, simple or detailed, and sometimes also very similar to characters in comicbooks or strips), our objective was to discover the attributes that individuals associate with help givers depicted in these various formats.

To achieve this aim, we selected 40 images showcasing help givers from the comprehensive corpus collected and organized within the PAT project (see Van der Sluis & Redeker, 2019), ensuring that the faces of the help givers were at least partly visible. These 40 images were then evaluated by a group of 107 participants (all of whom were university students), using two sets of representative adjectival traits presented in contrasting pairs (e.g., disorganized-organized, incompetent-capable, distrustful-trustful, rash-cautious), in line with Peabody’s (1987) catalogue of traits. The findings from this study suggest that a more favourable perception of traits is associated with images that are in colour, depicted from a bird's-eye view, or when the help giver is portrayed as a female, among other factors. It is our hope that the insights from this research will assist creators of future first-aid instruction materials to give more thoughtful consideration to the representation of help givers, thereby enhancing the effectiveness and relatability of their portrayals in first-aid guidance. The understanding of visual representation in instructional material stresses the importance of design choices in effectively conveying vital health information and optimizing learner engagement and comprehension