Texts and Graphs Elaboration: The Effect of Graphs' Examination on Recall

  • Authors:

  • Gisella Paoletti;Sara Rigutti

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Psychology, Trieste, Italy 34100;Department of Psychology, Trieste, Italy 34100

  • Venue:
  • Diagrams '08 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Diagrammatic Representation and Inference
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

We investigated readers' tendency to ignore graphs in textual contents, the effect of graphs' visibility on recall as well as the spatial contiguity effect of texts and graphs. Eighty subjects read on a computer screen a text with graphs that depicted statistics related to the contents and were tested using a recall questionnaire. The recall performance was found to be improved for observers that examined the graphs while neither the spatial contiguity nor the graphs' visibility affected the mnestic performance. Moreover we found that people tend to examine integrated graphs rather then graphs visualized within pop---up windows.