Interpreting Architectural Drawings: The Role of Gaze and Gestures in Cognitive Offloading

Abstract

Interpreting architectural drawings requires integrating explicit visual information with inferred spatial relationships, allowing the study of how internal cognitive processes interdepend on external representations. This study examines how gaze behavior and gestures function as cognitive offloading strategies in spatial interpretation tasks. Architecture students analyzed abstract and detailed floor plans of two buildings while interpreting the spatial function of rooms and user movement. Eye-tracking revealed that abstract drawings elicited more exploratory gaze patterns, while detailed drawings promoted focal attention and longer visual processing. Gesturing was more frequent in abstract drawings and motion tasks, supporting mental simulation of missing information, whereas deictic gestures dominated in the function interpretation of the detailed drawings, reinforcing explicit visual information. These findings suggest that gaze and gestures are jointly used to offload difficult mental transformations. More broadly, this work highlights how external cognition strategies adapt to task demands and representational affordances in spatial reasoning.