At last!
The special issue of Philosophia Scientiae on From Practice to Results in Logic and Mathematics, edited by me, Amirouche Moktefi, Sandra Mols and Jean Paul van Bendegem, has finally been published!
Archive for the ‘Literature’ Category
Rhett on different skills involved in using maps
In Literature on March 17, 2009 at 9:29 pm16 March 2009
Rhett Nichols (Master Student, Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS-EHESS-ENS)
Spontaneous abilities with symbolic representations
taken from Shusterman, A. B., Lee, S. A., & Spelke, E. S. (2008).
Short Abstract:
Various cognition studies address what skills are involved in using maps, and it is an array of different skills — in forming maps, looking at them, understanding them, using them, etc. For example, mental rotation abilities seem correlated with the ability to form a map from experience in the world. Some studies focus on correlation of different skills and navigation performance, trying to pick apart different stages of map understanding, or using people with specific deficits. The ability to understand a map _as_ a map, or recognizing and using the correspondence between the map and the world, seems to be a basic ability in itself beyond just matching the map to the world, and which is a reflection of a general ability to understand symbolic artifacts. It also seems to be innate and spontaneous, and develops at a certain age. These studies address this skill as well as whether it is innate, by examining when the ability arises in children.
Valeria on Pinker’s Theory of Graph
In Literature on December 2, 2008 at 7:56 pm24 November – 1 December
Valeria Giardino (Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS-EHESS-ENS)
Discussing A Theory of Graph Comprehension by Pinker
Reference: Steven Pinker (1990), ‘A Theory of Graph Comprehension’ in R. Feedle (Ed.), Artificial Intelligence and the future of testing (pp.73-126)
From Pinker’s article:
A striking fact about human cognition is that we like to process quantitative information in graphic form. One only has to look at the number of ways in which information is depicted in pictorial form–line, bar, and pie graphs, Venn diagrams, flow charts, tree structures, node networks, to name just a few–or to the great lengths that computer companies go to advertise the graphic capabilities of their products, to see that charts and graphs have enormous appeal to people. All of this is true despite the fact that in virtually every case, the same information can be communicated by nonpictorial means: tables of numbers, lists of propositions cross-referenced by global variables, labeled bracketings, and so on. Perhaps pictorial displays are simply pleasing to the eye, but both introspection and experimental evidence (Carter, 1947; Culbertson & Powers, 1959; Schutz, 1961a, 1961b; Washburne, 1927) suggest that, in fact, graphic formats present information in a way that is easier for people to perceive and reason about. However, it is hard to think of a theory or principle in contemporary cognitive science that explains why this should be so; why, for example, people should differ so strikingly from computers in regard to the optimal input format for quantitative information.
The goal of this chapter is to address this unexplained phenomenon in a systematic way. In particular, I propose a theory of what a person knows when he or she knows how to read a graph, and which cognitive operations a person executes in the actual process of reading the graph. This theory will be used to generate predictions about what makes a person better or worse at reading graphs, and what makes a graph better or worse at conveying a given type of information to a reader. In pursuing these goals, one must recognize a very pervasive constraint. Comprehending a graph (unlike, say, seeing in depth, uttering a sentence, or reaching for a target) is not something that anyone could argue is accomplished by a special-purpose mental faculty. Graphs are a recent invention and if they are an especially effective method of communication, it must be because they exploit general cognitive and perceptual mechanisms effectively. Any theory that hopes to explain the process of graph comprehension will have to identify the psychological mechanisms used in interpreting a graph, and which operating principles of each mechanism contribute to the overall ease or difficulty of the graph-reading process. Thus, any theory of graph comprehension will draw heavily on general cognitive and perceptual theory, and where our knowledge of cognitive and perceptual mechanisms is sketchy, we can expect corresponding gaps in our ability to explain the understanding of graphs.
