Year: 2000
Type: article
Abstract: The representational effect refers to the phenomenon that different isomorphic representations of a common structure can generate dramatically different representational efficiencies, task difficulties, and behavioral outcomes. This paper presents a study of applying distributed representations to systematically analyze the representational effect in complex real world systems. Distributed representation is a representational system that is composed of internal and external information that is processed in a dynamic, interactive, and interwoven manner. The representational effect is observed and studied in a series of experiments involving various navigational instruments used in aviation. The cognitive task was decomposed into its components and the information distribution across internal and external representations for each component was identified. The experimental results showed that the task difficulties of different instruments correlate positively with the amount of external information for the component tasks, as predicted by the distributed representation analysis.
Authors: Johnny Chuah, Jiajie Zhang, Todd R. Johnson
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Award: G8876996369
OpenAlex ID: W1513976545