Analogical representation and graph comprehension

Abstract

In this paper we argue that people sometimes construct analogical representations of the information that they extract from simple graphs and that these representations are subject to the same nomic constraints as the original graphical representations. We briefly review behavioural and neuropsychological findings across a range of tasks related to graph comprehension, which suggest that people spontaneously construct analogical representations with a spatial quality. We describe two experiments demonstrating that the representations constructed by people reasoning about graphs may also possess this spatial quality. We contrast our results with the predictions of current models of graph comprehension and outline some further questions for research. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.