Cognitive Science Approaches To Understanding Diagrammatic Representations

Through a wide variety of approaches cognitive sciencehas given us various important insights into thenature of diagrammatic representations. This papersurveys the findings, issues and approaches todiagrammatic representations in cognitive science. Important current issues that are highlighted include:the relation between the parts of the representationalsystem that are internal to the mind and in externalvisual media that presents the diagram; the use ofmultiple representations which is typical of realcontexts of diagram use; the benefits of diagrams interms of (i) computational offloading, (ii)re-representation and (iii) graphical constraining.