Spatial representations for graphical reasoning
Lara Webber, Barkowsky, C. Freska, Markus Knauff, Bernd Krieg-Brückner, Bernhard Nebel · 2004
Abstract. We describe an experiment designed to investigate whether people represent information presented graphically by analogy to space. Participants were presented with pairs of line graphs and bar graphs that specified the relationships between pairs of terms (A, B; B, C). The order of these terms was manipulated so that the end terms were either separated by the repeated term (e.g. ABBC) or were adjacent (e.g. BACB). Participants were asked to reproduce one of the premise graphs or to draw a graph relating the A and C terms. The order of the terms in these conclusions suggests that participants reordered the terms in the premise graphs so as to produce an integrated linear model of the information in the graph. Spatial ability was found to be associated with the tendency to reorder. These results suggest that people create spatial mental models for graphical reasoning. 1.