The Role of Working Memory Capacity in Graph Reading Performance

We process information in memory and different people have different memory capacity. It is therefore important to understand possible impact of memory capacity when it comes to graph comprehension. In an attempt towards this direction, we conducted a user study investigating the impact of working memory capacity on graph reading task performance. Forty-six university students participated in the study performing a graph reading task with one hundred graph drawings of different complexity levels. Their working memory capacity and task performance (accuracy and time) were measured and recorded. The results of regression analyses indicated that working memory capacity was a significant predictor of performance accuracy, but not for response time. In this paper, we present the details of the study and discuss our findings and limitations of the study. Possible future research directions are also suggested.