Appropriateness of graphical program representations for training applications

Abstract

Recent controversy about the ease of constructing and reading graphical program representationsis of interest to us because of our work on graphical programming applications for training. We apply cognitive complexity analysis to graphical and textual programs, and confm the empirical findings of other researchers. We also apply cognitive complexity analysis to graphical programs from our own work. The analysis suggests that, when optimized for a speciilc task, both textual and graphical programs can carry the same information with similar cognitive complexity. The selection of graphical and textual representations for comparison in real-world training applications remains problematic.