Cognitive mechanisms of understanding of verbal texts and infographics

The lab members published an article about the cognitive mechanisms of understanding of texts of verbal texts and infographics in “Psychological Journal”.

Based on the classical cognitive theories, one can expect that adding illustrations into texts (e.g. infographics) will influence positively the quality of their understanding of. However, recent studies show that readers experience some issues with understanding of general meaning of infographics, but tend to assess positively their own experience of processing texts of this type. These controversial evidences are the reason for conducting the current study that aimed at revealing cognitive mechanisms (of both understanding and self-estimate of understanding) manifesting when working with texts of various formats.
As a result of our study, no differences were found in the levels of texts’ comprehension and tests’ scores for texts of various formats. Self-esteems of the comprehension of verbal texts were higher than those of infographics. The results demonstrate that there is a qualitative specifics of cognitive mechanisms of understanding of texts of various formats; the difficulties with understanding of infographics with complicated content can be recognized and, thus, taken into consideration by readers.