Coherence and prior knowledge in visualizations

Based on Kintsch’(1994) research on the interaction between prior knowledge and text coherence for learning from text, we investigate whether the same effect is present when learning from visual instruction. In our first experiment, participants had to tie a tie following visual instructions with low or high coherence. Background knowledge was manipulated by giving half of the participants two practice knots (the others did not practice and therefore had no background knowledge). Results show that the high background knowledge group conducted the task faster than the low background knowledge group, but there was no interaction between background knowledge and coherence on performance. In the round table session, we would like to discuss merits of our approach and possible future studies.