118 Understanding Rational Decision Making
Similar to reading audiences, listening audiences usually forget the specifi c words uttered in a spokensentence almost immediately after they have heard it. In one study of listeners’ sentence comprehen-
sion, people listened to sentences and then had to distinguish between the original sentence and a close
paraphrase of it. Listeners’ memory for the exact wording of the sentence decayed rapidly, but their
memory for the sentence’s meaning persisted much longer.^129 In a subsequent study, although the
listeners remembered verbatim the words in the clause they were currently processing, they forgot the
exact words and word order of prior clauses as soon as each sentence was spoken.^130
Interestingly, listeners do tend to remember the exact wording of any message that has an emo-tional impact on them, as challenges or insults often do.^131 The exact wording of poems, song lyrics,
and important phrases are also more likely to be remembered. In addition, listeners are often able
to remember the exact wording of a sentence if they are requested to do so. In a study of audi-
tory recall, two groups of listeners listened to recorded instructions. The fi rst group was told to
remember the sentences in the instructions verbatim; the second group was not. Then both groups’
memory of the style and content of the sentences was tested. The fi rst group remembered the sen-
tences in the instructions verbatim—both style and content. The second group remembered each
sentence’s meaning but little of its exact wording.^132
Viewers’ Comprehension
When audiences comprehend images they spontaneously assign verbal labels to them (e.g., “That
is a picture of a young mother holding her baby”).^133 Older children and adults automatically
assign a verbal label to all except the most complex and novel images.^134 Although audiences
normally extract meaning from a verbal message and forget the style in which it was presented,
they typically remember the exact picture they saw as well as its meaning. Asked to look at a set
of 10,000 pictures, viewers were later able to identify 83% of the pictures they had seen.^135 In a
study of advertisement recall, consumers were presented 600 magazine ads all containing text and
pictures. Consumers recognized 96.7% of the pictures immediately after viewing them, 99.7% after
a two-hour delay, 92% after three days, 87% after seven days, and 57.7% after 120 days. Consumers
had an 11.8% error rate in distinguishing read versus unread sentences in the ads, but only a 1.5%
error rate in distinguishing viewed versus not-viewed pictures.^136
Graph comprehension is a combination of text and image comprehension. The time neededfor graph comprehension is similar to that needed to read and understand a paragraph of mod-
erate length.^137 But before an audience can comprehend a graph, they must fi rst translate its
visual features into the concepts those features represent.^138 One theory of graph comprehension
proposes that after viewers encode the visual features in a graph, they then interpret the mean-
ings of those features as quantitative concepts. For example, viewers may recognize that a straight
line in a graph represents a linear relationship. Only then do they identify what each feature of
the graph refers to. Additional graph comprehension processes include keeping track of multiple
comparisons, performing calculations, and mentally translating from one scale to another.^139
More recent experimental studies of graph comprehension indicate that viewers first acti-vate a mental model or schema of a graph when trying to interpret its meaning. Then they
map its graphic elements onto the schema’s conceptual entities and its spatial relations onto
the schema’s semantic relations.^140 Errors that viewers make when interpreting graphs pri-
marily result from inadequate schemata rather than inaccurate perceptual processes. In one
study of graph comprehension, all of the viewers accurately reproduced from memory the
graphs they had seen, but because many of them lacked the knowledge or schemata needed
to interpret the quantitative information depicted by the graphs, they were unable to grasp
their meaning.^141