Visualizing Thought

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Topics in cognitive science 2011-07, Vol.3 (3), p.499-535
Main Author: Tversky, Barbara
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Action
Analogy
Cognition
Communication
Diagrams
Gesture
Humans
Metaphor
Spatial cognition
Thinking
Visual communication
Visual Perception
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Summary: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 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‐ion‐action interconnections termed spractions. The designed world is a diagram.
ISSN:1756-8757
1756-8765
DOI:10.1111/j.1756-8765.2010.01113.x