BACKGROUND: Although many previous studies have focused on statistical graph comprehension in cognitive psychology, there is no consensus among them.
OBJECTIVE: Brain neuroimaging studies on the statistical graph comprehension are useful to account for the cognitive mechanism of interpreting statistical graphic information.
METHODS: The present study used two experimental conditions, a statistical graph (SG) and a statistical graph with text (SGT), and one control condition, a text (ST), where the ST task was a verbal description of the information from the SG, and when the SGT is a mixed graph + textual description. We used fMRI to investigate the brain activity of 36 normal subjects while they passively viewed the statistical information presented in visual forms as SG, ST or SGT.
RESULTS: The results showed that compared with the control tasks, both SG and SGT consistently activated ventral and dorsal streams and that compared with SGT, SG significantly activated the ventral stream but not the dorsal stream.
CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that the portions of the ventral and dorsal streams related to object recognition are commonly involved in statistical graph comprehension. These findings provide neuroimaging evidence for the cognitive processing of statistical graphs.
Research articleFirst published online March, 2015
