DIAGRAMS AS AIDS TO PROBLEM-SOLVING - THEIR ROLE IN FACILITATING SEARCH AND COMPUTATION

In two experiments, university students solved kinship problems as they studied family trees or lists of statements about who was whose parent. Subjects were given problems to solve requiring the application of rules to the statements or trees. In the first experiment, response latency was less for subjects seeing trees than for those seeing statements. It was also found that latency increased as the problems became more difficult. In the second experiment, response latencies for subjects seeing no rules were less on difficult problems than for subjects working with rules involving English and nonsense kinship terms. This difference disappeared with practice. These findings provided support for an account of diagram interpretation based on the facilitation of search and computation through the spatial arrangement of concepts. © 1991 the Association for Educational Communications and Technology.