This study is based on the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (Mayer 2009). We investigated how readers process and comprehend information when reading and listening texts of different formats: infographics, audiotext, infographics combined with audiotext, written format. Biographies of four Russian writers were used as the material. All the stimuli were of the same size and the same level of readability. In a four-group design experiment, 32 foreign students and 32 native speakers of Russian examined four texts in four different formats, answered the factual and analytical afterthe-text questions, gave the keywords and estimated the difficulty of each text. The overall results made it possible to build a hierarchy of best-perceived formats for both groups of participants.