Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Graph comprehension requires both bottom-up processing from the graph representation and top-down processing guided by knowledge and attitude. In the current study, we investigated which of the bottom-up process phases: extraction, interpretation, and decision: were affected by the top-down processing derived by the impressions and social attitudes. The experimental results showed that the top-down processing driven by impressions temporarily formed in specific contexts affected both the extraction of information and the following decision phase whereas top-down processing driven by attitude formed over a long time based on social norms affected only the decision phase. In the latter case, a decision was made without any need for bottom-up processing.