Abstract

Three experiments were conducted, exploring issues concerning visual representations of conditional structures. The first experiment originated in response to a paper by Green & Petre (1992), in which they compared subject performances on textual and visual representations of conditional structures, and which concluded that the visual programs were harder to comprehend than the textual programs. The results of Green & Petre (1992) also supported the `match-mismatch' hypothesis, which holds that `forwards' structures, ("condition implies action, with nesting", Green & Petre, 1992), facilitate access to `sequential' information (Green 1977), whilst `backwards' structures. ("action is governed by conditions, with boolean operators in place of nesting ", Green & Petre, 1992), facilitates access to `circumstantial' information, (Gilmore & Green, 1984). Experiment One in this report compared an alternative forwards visual representation to the forwards textual representation of Green & Petre...

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