Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A breath of research has investigated how characteristics of visualizations and characteristics of texts influence learningand generalization. Given that students integrate information from visualizations and text, we investigate how the char-acteristics of the text depends on characteristics of the visualization. We focus on two characteristics of visualizations(perceptual richness, and whether they display variability), and one characteristic of the text (use of generic language). Wefound that the majority of visualization were detailed photographs and do not display variability. Most of the text usedgeneric language, but we found that some visualizations qualified these generic statements with more specific phrases.The use of generic was more common for visualizations that display variability and photographs. Our study highlightsthe importance of investigating what students are normally exposed to and suggest that future research on multi-medialearning should place close attention to the characteristics of the text that accompany the visualization.