Gattis M, Holyoak K J
Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, USA.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 1996 Jan;22(1):231-9. doi: 10.1037//0278-7393.22.1.231.
In 3 experiments, the authors investigated the impact of goals and perceptual relations on graph interpretation when people evaluate functional dependencies between continuous variables. Participants made inferences about the relative rate of 2 continuous linear variables (altitude and temperature). The authors varied the assignments of variables to axes, the perceived cause-effect relation between the variables, and the causal status of the variable being queried. The most striking finding was that accuracy was greater when the slope-mapping constraint was honored, which requires that the variable being queried be assigned to the vertical axis, so that steeper lines map to faster changes in the queried variable. The authors propose that graphs provide external instantiations of intermediate mental representations, enabling people to move from visuospatial representations to abstractions through the use of natural mappings between perceptual and conceptual relations.
在3项实验中，作者研究了人们在评估连续变量之间的函数依赖关系时，目标和感知关系对图表解读的影响。参与者对2个连续线性变量（海拔和温度）的相对变化率进行了推断。作者改变了变量在坐标轴上的分配、变量之间的因果关系感知以及被查询变量的因果状态。最显著的发现是，当遵循斜率映射约束时，准确性更高，该约束要求将被查询变量分配到垂直轴上，这样更陡的线映射到被查询变量更快的变化上。作者提出，图表提供了中间心理表征的外部实例，使人们能够通过利用感知和概念关系之间的自然映射，从视觉空间表征转向抽象表征。
