Images and inference

A Cognitive Theory of Graphical and Linguistic Reasoning: Logic and Implementation

“…Funt (1977Funt ( , 1980 developed the WHISPER system, which employed a spatially organized "retina" of elements for problem solving. Lindsay (1988) developed a system that exploited the specificity of diagrams, again in the domains of mechanics problems. All of these authors were motivated by observations that graphics aid reasoning and that this is for very general computational reasons.…”

The manipulation of images to handle indeterminacy in spatial reasoning

“…The question that motivates this work is, in what ways does imagery represent a distinct computational mechanism? For comparison, some combination of a logical inference technique or rule-based deduction method over an axiomatization of spatial knowledge such as those discussed in Section 1 is generally considered to be the main alternative computational mechanism (Lindsay, 1988).…”

“…Finally, more quantitative axiomatizations refer explicitly to a real-valued, threedimensional coordinate system to capture the semantics of spatial prepositions (Davis, 1990). These axiomatic/deductive approaches to spatial reasoning are often criticized for being inefficient (Lindsay, 1988).…”

A glimpse of expert programmers' mental imagery

“…Logic (1989) described an economy of images in memory, through which that access might be achieved: many informative elements are integrated together in a structural whole, increasing the available amount of information in working memory. Lindsay (1988) claimed that images differ from deductive propositional representations, in that they allow inferences that are not based on proof procedures. Goel (1995), although he was describing external representations, argued that dense, amorphous, ambiguous symbol systems (like sketching or visualisation) have an important place in cognition, and correlate with creative, explorative, ill-structured phases of problem solving.…”