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Handbook of Human Centric Visualization pp 3–40Cite as

Visualizing Thought

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Abstract

Depictive expressions of thought predate written language by thousands of years. They have evolved in communities through a kind of informal user testing that has refined them. Analyzing common visual communications reveals consistencies that illuminate how people think as well as guide design; the process can be brought into the laboratory and accelerated. Like language, visual communications abstract and schematize; unlike language, they use properties of the page (e.g., proximity and place: center, horizontal/up-down, vertical/left-right) and the marks on it (e.g., dots, lines, arrows, boxes, blobs, likenesses, symbols) to convey meanings. The visual expressions of these meanings (e.g., individual, category, order, relation, correspondence, continuum, hierarchy) have analogs in language, gesture, and especially in the patterns that are created when people design the world around them, arranging things into piles and rows and hierarchies and arrays, spatial-abstraction-action interconnections termed spractions. The designed world is a diagram.

This paper is reprinted with permission from Topics in Cognitive Science, 2011,3, 499–535.

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Acknowledgments

The author is indebted to many colleagues, collaborators, and commentators, including Maneesh Agrawala, Jon Bresman, Herb Clark, Danny Cohen, Jim Corter, Stu Card, Felice Frankel, Nancy Franklin, Pat Hanrahan, Mary Hegarty, Julie Heiser, Angela Kessell, Paul Lee, Julie Morrison, Jeff Nickerson, Jane Nisselson, Laura Novick, Ben Shneiderman, Penny Small, Masaki Suwa, Holly Taylor, Jeff Zacks, and Doris Zahner. The author is also indebted to the following grants for facilitating the research and⁄or preparing the manu- script: National Science Foundation HHC 0905417, IIS-0725223, IIS-0855995, and REC 0440103, the Stanford Regional Visualization and Analysis Center, and Office of Naval Research NOOO14-PP-1-O649, N000140110717, and N000140210534.

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  1. Columbia Teachers College, 525 W. 120th, New York, NY, 10025, USA

    Barbara Tversky

  2. Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Bldg 420, 450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA, 94305-2130, USA

    Barbara Tversky

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  1. CSIRO ICT Centre, Marsfield, New South Wales, Australia

    Weidong Huang

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Tversky, B. (2014). Visualizing Thought. In: Huang, W. (eds) Handbook of Human Centric Visualization. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7485-2_1

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