Tutorial 2c: The Coordination of External Representations and Internal Mental Representations in Display-Based Cognitive Tasks

Abstract

Many cognitive tasks, whether in everyday cognition, scientific practice, or professional life, are distributed cognitive tasks-tasks that require integrative, interactive, and dynamical processing of information retrieved from internal representations and that perceived from external representations through the interplay between perception and cognition. The representational effect is the ubiquitous phenomenon that different representations of a common structure can generate dramatically different representational efficiencies, task complexities, and behavioral outcomes. A framework of distributed representations is proposed to account for the representational effect in distributed cognitive tasks. This framework considers internal and external representations as two indispensable components of a single system and suggests that the relative distribution of information across internal and external representations is the major factor of the representational effect in distributed cognitive tasks. A representational determinism is also proposed-the form of a representation determines what information can be perceived, what processes can be activated, and what structures can be learned and discovered from the specific representation. Applications of the framework of distributed representations will be described for three domains: problem solving, relational information displays, and numberation systems.