Georgia Institute of Technology, USA.
IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph. 2010 Nov-Dec;16(6):999-1008. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2010.177.
Although previous research has suggested that examining the interplay between internal and external representations can benefit our understanding of the role of information visualization (InfoVis) in human cognitive activities, there has been little work detailing the nature of internal representations, the relationship between internal and external representations and how interaction is related to these representations. In this paper, we identify and illustrate a specific kind of internal representation, mental models, and outline the high-level relationships between mental models and external visualizations. We present a top-down perspective of reasoning as model construction and simulation, and discuss the role of visualization in model based reasoning. From this perspective, interaction can be understood as active modeling for three primary purposes: external anchoring, information foraging, and cognitive offloading. Finally we discuss the implications of our approach for design, evaluation and theory development.
尽管先前的研究表明，研究内部和外部表示之间的相互作用可以帮助我们理解信息可视化 (InfoVis) 在人类认知活动中的作用，但很少有工作详细描述内部表示的性质、内部表示和外部表示之间的关系以及交互如何与这些表示相关。在本文中，我们确定并说明了一种特定的内部表示，即心理模型，并概述了心理模型和外部可视化之间的高级关系。我们从模型构建和模拟的角度提出了推理的自上而下的观点，并讨论了可视化在基于模型的推理中的作用。从这个角度来看，交互可以被理解为主动建模，主要有三个目的：外部锚定、信息搜索和认知卸载。最后，我们讨论了我们的方法对设计、评估和理论发展的意义。
