Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Can the representation of event sequence influence how jurorsremember and reason in a legal case? We addressed this ques-tion by examining the interaction between an individual’s pre-ferred spatial construal of time (SCT) for an external (visual-spatial) representation and the SCT of a courtroom graphic.One hundred fifty three undergraduates played the role of ju-rors in a fictitious civil trial. The details of a case were re-counted in a multimedia presentation featuring timelines an-imated in one of four orientations: left-right, right-left, top-bottom, and bottom-top. Participants were assessed on mea-sures of comprehension and causal reasoning. Results indi-cated effects of timeline orientation and SCT choice behav-ior on comprehension and reasoning. We discuss these resultsin terms of the role of attention in temporal-causal reasoning,and implications for the design of multimedia materials for thecourtroom.