Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: Why do people create extra representations to help them make sense of situations, diagrams, illustrations, instructions and problems?The obvious explanation -external representations save internal memory and computation -is only part of the story.I discuss eight ways external representations enhance cognitive power: they provide a structure that can serve as a shareable object of thought; they create persistent referents; they change the cost structure of the inferential landscape; they facilitate re-representation; they are often a more natural representation of structure than mental representations; they facilitate the computation of more explicit encoding of information; they enable the construction of arbitrarily complex structure; and they lower the cost of controlling thought -they help coordinate thought.
Author: David Kirsh
Institution: University of California San Diego
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1604577315