An Experimental Study Towards Investigating the Effect of Working Memory Capacity on Complex Diagram Understandability

his study investigates whether working memory (WM) capacity affects the understandability of complex diagrams and if so, whether WM training has a positive effect on their comprehensibility. Two experiments were conducted with computer science students. In the first experiment, we collected eyetrack...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inTEM Journal Vol. 9; no. 4; pp. 1384 - 1395
Main Authors Sözen, Nergiz, Say, Bilge, Kılıç, Özkan
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Novi Pazar UIKTEN - Association for Information Communication Technology Education and Science 01.11.2020
Subjects
Cognitive ability
Cognitive load
Computer engineering
Computer science
Data models
Experiments
ICT Information and Communications Technologies
Information systems
Memory
Problem solving
Software
Symmetry
Training
visual search
working memory capacity
diagram comprehension
cognitive training
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Summary:his study investigates whether working memory (WM) capacity affects the understandability of complex diagrams and if so, whether WM training has a positive effect on their comprehensibility. Two experiments were conducted with computer science students. In the first experiment, we collected eyetracking data while participants performed comprehension tasks on an activity diagram. In the second experiment, the participants completed WM training, before and after their comprehension scores were measured. The results showed that working memory capacity can positively affect the understandability of complex diagrams, but it provided no conclusive evidence for the effectiveness of working memory training.
ISSN:2217-8309
2217-8333
DOI:10.18421/TEM94-09