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The Cognitive Design of Tools of Thought

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Abstract

When thought overwhelms the mind, the mind puts it into the world, notably in diagrams and gestures.Both use space and arrays of elements, depictive and non-depictive, to convey ideas, concrete and abstract,clear and sketchy. The arrays and the non-depictive elements like boxes and arrows serve to showrelationships and organizations, thematic, categorical, and more. on paper, in the air, in the diagrammedworld. Human actions organize space to convey abstractions: spraction.

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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to my colleagues and collaborators, especially Valeria Giardino, Jocelyn Penny Small, Azadeh Jamalian, Angela Kessell, Julie Heiser, Paul Lee, and Jeff Zacks. I am grateful the Varieties of Understanding Project at Fordham University and The John Templeton Foundation and to the following National Science Foundation grants for facilitating the research and/or preparing the manuscript: National Science Foundation HHC 0905417, IIS-0725223, IIS-0855995, and REC 0440103. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funders.

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    Barbara Tversky

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Tversky, B. The Cognitive Design of Tools of Thought. Rev.Phil.Psych. 6, 99–116 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0214-3

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