Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigated how college students answer questions about the content of illustrated expository text. Subjects studied illustrated texts describing causal event chains that unfold during the operation of everyday machines. Subjects subsequently provided written answers to questions about events occurring in each machine. Four types of questions were asked: why did event X occur?. how did X occur?, what are the consequences pf X occurring?, and what if X didn't occur?. In our analysis of the answer protocols, we adopted the theoretical framework of the QUES T model of human question answering (Graesser & Franklin, 1990). The present study supported predictions generated from three components of the QUEST model: question categorization, utilization of information sources, and convergence principles. Our results also revealed two novel findings. First, subjects had a bias toward sampling information from the text more than from the picture. Second, subjects tended to sample infontiation depicted in both the text and the picture.