Visualizing Thought

Abstract

Depictive expressions of thought predate written language by thousands of years. They have evolved in communities through a kind of informal user testing that has refined them. Analyzing common visual communications reveals consistencies that illuminate how people think as well as guide design; the process can be brought into the laboratory and accelerated. Like language, visual communications abstract and schematize; unlike language, they use properties of the page (e.g., proximity and place: center, horizontal ⁄ up-down, vertical ⁄ left-right) and the marks on it (e.g., dots, lines, arrows, boxes, blobs, likenesses, symbols) to convey meanings. The visual expressions of these meanings (e.g., individual, category, order, relation, correspondence, continuum, hierarchy) have analogs in language, gesture, and especially in the patterns that are created when people design the world around them, arranging things into piles and rows and hierarchies and arrays, spatial-abstraction-action interconnections termed spractions. The designed world is a diagram.

Drawing to Learn in Science

“…Understanding 'sound waves', for instance, can involve being able to coordinate a range of wave diagrams, time sequenced representations of air particle movement and pressure variation. Different representations have distinctive attributes that both guide and constrain what learners do and come to understand (17)(18)(19). As they select specific features to focus on in their drawing, learners reason in various ways, aligning their drawing with observation, measurement, and/or emerging ideas (6,20).…”

Complementarity of Space and Time in Distance Representations

“…a compass based on the sun position, in everyday human navigation. Tversky (2011) notes that knowledge of space on the horizontal plane is derived from motion in time, hence spatial distance is often expressed as time. She adds that since each and every motion occurs in space and takes time, space and time are interchangeable and intertwined in numerous senses.…”

Show me your opinion. Perceptual cues in creating and reading argument diagrams

“…Furthermore, space on a page is often used resembling real space, that is, things on the ground are put on the bottom of a page and things in the sky are put on top. More abstract concepts also often follow literal space, by using metaphors (Tversky 2011). Even though a standpoint does not need to be on a certain position in space, its position may follow spatial metaphors used in language on argumentation, such as 'a topic is central to a debate' (Lakoff and Johnson 1980).…”