Abstract
Although it is apparent that people are able to make inferences from graphs, it is presently unclear how they do so, even from simple graphs. Current theories of graph comprehension are largely silent about the processes by which such inferences are made (e.g., Freedman & Shah, 2002; Pinker, 1990). We propose that people use spatial reasoning, in the form of spatial transformations (Trafton, Trickett, & Mintz, in press), to answer inferential questions. Spatial transformations are cognitive operations that a person performs on internal or external visualizations, such as graphs. They occur when people must mentally create or delete something (e.g., a line) on the image in order to facilitate problem solving, and may be related to hypothetical drawing (Shimojima & Fukaya, 2003). This paper investigates the use of spatial transformations when people need to make inferences from graphs.
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Freedman, E.G., Shah, P.: Toward a model of knowledge-based graph comprehension. In: Hegarty, M., Meyer, B., Narayanan, N.H. (eds.) Diagrams 2002. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2317, p. 18. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
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Shimojima, A., Fukaya, T.: Do we really reason about a picture as the referent? Paper presented at the 25th annual meeting of Cognitive Science (2003)
Trafton, J.G., Trickett, S.B., Mintz, F.E.: Overlaying images: Spatial transformations of complex visualizations. Foundations of Science (in press)
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Trickett, S.B., Trafton, J.G. (2004). Spatial Transformations in Graph Comprehension. In: Blackwell, A.F., Marriott, K., Shimojima, A. (eds) Diagrammatic Representation and Inference. Diagrams 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2980. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-25931-2_42
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-25931-2_42
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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