Stefania Passera and her colleagues performed an experimental study to assess the value of diagrams in a complex business-to-business contract. They provided 122 subjects, experts on contracts drawn from an international pool with a wide variety of mother tongues, two versions of the same commercial contract in English. They were identical except that the version the “treatment” group used included diagrams, and the one the “control” group used was text only. Participants performed location and comprehension tasks the researchers specified.

Here are the key takeaways:

• The group using the version with diagrams found relevant information and solved comprehension tasks significantly more quickly than the control group.
• The treatment group also performed tasks significantly more accurately than those using text-only contracts.
• The previous two effects worked together, so participants in the treatment group performed with significantly higher efficiency (a function of objective performance and subjective, perceived mental effort) than the control group.
• Cognitive style—whether the participant was a “visualizer” or “verbalizer”—did not interact with the treatment. In other words, cognitive style did not have a statistically significant effect on results, but the sample size here is probably too small to rule it out.

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