Connecting Internal and External Representations: Spatial Transformations of Scientific Visualizations.

摘要

Many scientific discoveries have depended on external diagrams or visualizations. Many scientists also report to use as internal mental representation or mental imagery to help them solve problems and reason. How do scientists connect these internal and external representations. We examine working scientists as they worked on external scientific visualizations. We coded the number and type of special transformations (mental operations that scientists used on internal or external representations or images) and found that there were a very large number of comparisons, either between different visualizations or between a visualization and the scientists' internal mental representation.