Distributed Cognition as a Theoretical Framework for Information Visualization

Even though information visualization (InfoVis) research has matured in recent years, it is generally acknowledged that the field still lacks supporting, encompassing theories. In this paper, we argue that the distributed cognition framework can be used to substantiate the theoretical foundation of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 2008-11, Vol.14 (6), p.1173-1180
Main Authors: Zhicheng Liu, Nersessian, N., Stasko, J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biomimetics - methods
Buildings
Cognition
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive science
Computer Graphics
Construction
Data visualization
distributed cognition
Distributed computing
Electronic mail
Foundations
Guidelines
Human
Humans
Index Terms&#8212
Informatics - methods
Information Storage and Retrieval - methods
Information visualization
interaction
Performance evaluation
representation
Testing
theory and methods
User-Computer Interface
Visualization
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Summary:Even though information visualization (InfoVis) research has matured in recent years, it is generally acknowledged that the field still lacks supporting, encompassing theories. In this paper, we argue that the distributed cognition framework can be used to substantiate the theoretical foundation of InfoVis. We highlight fundamental assumptions and theoretical constructs of the distributed cognition approach, based on the cognitive science literature and a real life scenario. We then discuss how the distributed cognition framework can have an impact on the research directions and methodologies we take as InfoVis researchers. Our contributions are as follows. First, we highlight the view that cognition is more an emergent property of interaction than a property of the human mind. Second, we argue that a reductionist approach to study the abstract properties of isolated human minds may not be useful in informing InfoVis design. Finally we propose to make cognition an explicit research agenda, and discuss the implications on how we perform evaluation and theory building.
ISSN:1077-2626
1941-0506
DOI:10.1109/TVCG.2008.121