Do irrelevant depth cues affect the comprehension of bar graphs

Eight participants decided whether two- or three-dimensional bars embedded within two- or three-dimensional frames were semantically consistent with written inequalities of the form 'A>B'. Inequalities were presented either before (Experiment 1) or after the graphs (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, irrelevant depth cues were associated with slower decision times and there was no processing cost associated with an inconsistency between the dimensionalities of bars and frames. Memory encoding and retrieval times in Experiment 2 were affected by both graph complexity and consistency. Neither a depth consistency heuristic nor the maximum ink-data ratio principle can account for these results. More appropriate guidance for graph design will come from elaborating the working memory component of current cognitive models of graph processing. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Language: en

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