Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Current models of graph understanding typically address the encoding and interpretive processes involved during the course of comprehension and largely focus on the visual properties of the graph. An experiment comparing reasoning with two types of graph is presented. On the basis and scope of existing models, performance with the two graphs would not be predicted to differ substantially. There are substantial computational differences between the graphs, however. It is suggested, therefore, that an adequate model of graph use must incorporate different combinations of visual properties of the graphs, levels of graph complexity, interpretive schemas and task requirements.