How can cognitive science inform InfoVis and what cognitive research work is relevant for InfoVis? Cognition is such a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that there are diverse approaches of studying it. Perhaps not every approach is relevant for InfoVis. Some, for example, look at the neurological basis of cognition, mapping different brain areas to different cognitive functions. Knowing that the visual cortex is in charge of vision or the dorsal/ventral streams specialize in different functions may be useful for understanding and treating abnormal behaviors due to brain lesions, but it doesn’t really tell us much about how and why InfoVis works.

In the research agenda outlined in Illuminating the path, two strands of cognitive research are identified for having the potential of informing InfoVis/Visual Analytics. One is “laboratory-based psychology studies that establish the basic bottlenecks in human abilities to perceive, attend and process information“. I interpret this description to refer to work such as the “magic number 7+-2” for human working memory capacity, pre-attentive perception, confirmation biases and limitation in attention. Many of these research findings are well-known to InfoVis researchers and are widely used. The second strand is “higher-order, embodied, enactive, and distributed models such as those proposed by Gibson and Varela et al.” The relevant work here is seldom talked about or even known by InfoVis researchers.

In Illuminating the path, there is really not much elaboration on the second strand. According to what I know, here’s a list of relevant work that may fit well into the category (Feel free to suggest more, and I didn’t read all of them, of course.):

• ecological psychology
  important figures: James J. Gibson, whose research focus is on visual perception
  important books/papers: Senses as perceptual systems, Ecological approach to Visual Perception, Action in perception

• distributed cognition
  important figures: Edwin Hutchins, David Kirsh and maybe Andy Clark, who proposed the extended mind hypothesis (difference between DCog and extended mind, anyone?)
  important books/papers: Cognition in the Wild, Supersizing the mind, Being there

• activity theory/Vygotskian psychology
  important figures: Lev Vygotsky, James V. Wertsch, Bonnie Nardi
  important books/papers: Social formation of mind, mind as action, thought and language

• situated cognition
  important figures: Lucy Suchman, William Clancey, Jean Lave, James Greeno
  important books/papers: plans and situated action, situated cognition, cognition in practice

• embodied cognition
  important figures: George Lakoff, Francois Varela, Rodney Brooks
  important books/papers: metaphors we live by, embodied mind

• cognitive anthropology
  important figures: Bradd Shore, Michael Tomasello, Roy D’Andrade
  important books: culture in mind, development of cognitive anthropology

With all the buzz words such as “situated”, “distributed” or “embodied”, it seems that this list is aiming for a complete departure from the good old information-processing approaches to cognition. I would argue that many of these works are not as radical as they sound. In fact, many useful findings that may be classified as “traditional cognitive science” can be synthesized with these approaches. In future posts I’ll focus on some of these books that I’ve read and discuss my interpretations of them.

Coming up next: different kinds of internal representations