Abstract
Adults and children viewed about thirty varied paired graphics derived from school science textbooks and explained meaningful aspects of each item. Verbal responses and eye tracking results indicated that while adult’s participants understood most of the items and directed their attention to high relevance aspects of the graphics; children had lower score and did not always direct their attention only to relevant features. In adults, although some variables, such as the typicality of the graphic pairs appeared to influence comprehension, others such as content complexity seemed to have no effect. In children three main categories of errors were found, which were mostly related to the design of the paired graphics. In children, we showed that adding more items did not result in better results in the case of younger students, which we interpreted in terms of less developed executive functions.