Thinking with external representations

By David Kirsh. Ai & Society, 2010

556 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Why do people create extra representations to help them make sense of situations, diagrams, illustrations, instructions and problems? The obvious explanation—external representations save internal memory and computation—is only part of the story. I discuss seven ways external representations enhance cognitive power: they change the cost structure of the inferential landscape; they provide a structure that can serve as a shareable object of thought; they create persistent referents; they facilitate re-representation; they are often a more natural representation of structure than mental representations; they facilitate the computation of more explicit encoding of information; they enable the construction of arbitrarily complex structure; and they lower the cost of controlling thought—they help coordinate thought. Jointly, these functions allow people to think more powerfully with external representations than without. They allow us to think the previously unthinkable.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/554110652c28511fc976fb614d7b0dea9105f9b2

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Citations in the corpus

Thinking with the Body (2010, unknown): “[Hutchins, 05, Kirsh 09, 10].”
How Students Learn Content in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Through Drawing Activities (2019, unknown): “This engagement with content helps students revise their mental models, learn how to use their drawings, and participate in the drawing practices of STEM professionals (Avgerinou and Pettersson 2011; Kirsh 2010; Palmer 1978; Pinker 1990).”
Seeing mind in action (2012, methodology): “As shared, publically accessible objects of thought and feeling they invite a common perceptual focus and afford mutual interaction (Kirsh 2010b; Goldin-Meadow 2003).”
Drawing to reason and learn in science (2020, background): “In theorizing this approach, we have drawn on studies of the epistemic practices of science itself that foreground the active role of representational work in scientific discovery (Gooding, 2004, 2006; Latour, 1986), and the increasingly pervasive role of diverse representational work in generating ”
The Enactive Roots of STEM: Rethinking Educational Design in Mathematics (2015, background): “For it assumes a Bcorrespondence between external 372 Educ Psychol Rev (2015) 27:371–389 expressions (such as speech, written mathematical forms, and gestures) and some internal mechanism generating these expressions^ (Roth 2015, p. 1).”
An Embedded and Embodied Cognition Review of Instructional Manipulatives (2014, background): “Embedded Cognition amounts to the idea that cognition is afforded and constrained by ongoing interactions between body and environment, emphasizing an intimate relationship between external artifacts and cognitive processes (Clark 2008; Hutchins 1995; Kirsh 1995, 2010; Wilson 2002).”