Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The ability to interpret graphs is crucial for educational and professional success, yet many people struggle with graph comprehension. This study investigates how children process graphical information and what graph elements they attend to, encode, and retain. Middle school children completed three tasks. In the Description Task, participants described a graph either while viewing it or from memory. The Recognition Task assessed participants' ability to detect and remember differences in specific components (i.e., axes, scales, and trends) between two graphs. The Slope Judgment Task examined whether judgments of rate of change relied more on pictorial cues (e.g., visual steepness) or semantic cues (e.g., scale values). We found that children consistently extracted and recalled pictorial features across tasks, whereas quantitative semantic features such as axis scales were encoded and retained less accurately. These findings clarify the nature of children's graph encoding and have implications for graph comprehension instruction.