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How People Extract Information from Graphs: Evidence from a Sentence-Graph Verification Paradigm

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Theory and Application of Diagrams (Diagrams 2000)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 1889))

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Abstract

Graph comprehension is constrained by the goals of the cognitive system that processes the graph and by the context in which the graph appears. In this paper we report the results of a study using a sentence-graph verification paradigm. We recorded participants’ reaction times to indicate whether the information contained in a simple bar graph matched a written description of the graph. Aside from the consistency of visual and verbal information, we manipulated whether the graph was ascending or descending, the relational term in the verbal description, and the labels of the bars of the graph. Our results showed that the biggest source of variance in people’s reaction times is whether the order in which the referents appear in the graph is the same as the order in which they appear in the sentence. The implications of this finding for contemporary theories of graph comprehension are discussed.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Durham, Science Laboratories, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK

    Aidan Feeney, Ala K. W. Hola, Simon P. Liversedge, John M. Findlay & Robert Metcalf

Authors
  1. Aidan Feeney
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  2. Ala K. W. Hola
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  3. Simon P. Liversedge
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  4. John M. Findlay
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  5. Robert Metcalf
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Hartford, Dana Hall 230, 200 Bloomfield Avenue, West Hartford, Connecticut, 06117, USA

    Michael Anderson

  2. School of Psychology ESRC Centre for Research in Development, Instruction and Training, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK

    Peter Cheng

  3. Computer Science Department, University of Hamburg, Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30, 22527, Hamburg, Germany

    Volker Haarslev

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© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Feeney, A., Hola, A.K.W., Liversedge, S.P., Findlay, J.M., Metcalf, R. (2000). How People Extract Information from Graphs: Evidence from a Sentence-Graph Verification Paradigm. In: Anderson, M., Cheng, P., Haarslev, V. (eds) Theory and Application of Diagrams. Diagrams 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1889. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44590-0_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44590-0_16

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67915-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44590-6

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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