Role of External Spatial Representations in Spatial Thinking

Role of External Spatial Representations in Spatial Thinking

Note that many of the previous examples (e.g., the periodic table, flow diagrams, molecular models) are external spatial representations. That is, they are visible on paper or some other physical medium, though they do exist in some form in the mind as well. People have been creating external representations since before recorded history, from maps in the sand to bent trees as trail markers to notches on wood to record heads of cattle. The advantages of externalizing spatial representations are multiple.

They provide a semipermanent record that can be examined by a community, unlike mental representations that may be forgotten and are accessible only to an individual. For science and engineering, external representations have the advantage of being visible to other members of a community. They can be referred to by gesture as well as language in explaining, inferring, and discovery. They relieve the burden of limited working memory to maintain a representation, freeing it to perform transformations and operations on an external representation. Thus, one important function of external spatial representations is to augment working memory. Another is to focus attention on critical aspects of the conceptions. Like internal spatial representations, external spatial representations schematize; they omit irrelevant information and highlight the relevant.

External representations may also be supplemented with diagrammatic devices that focus attention, such as arrows, guidelines, boxes, brackets, and boldface large type. Many external representations are pictorial. All other things equal, pictures are easier to remember than comparable words, so spatial representations also facilitate long-term memory for the concepts they convey. We have already mentioned the key to creating effective external representations: they must convey the essential conceptual information and eliminate the irrelevant information that can clutter and distract. This is harder than it sounds. For example, what information should be included in a tourist map? Which facilities of use to tourists-historic buildings, museums, restaurants, hotels, and so on should be included, without cluttering the map with so much information that none of it is legible? Similar problems arise in scientific visualizations.

Another issue in designing effective visualizations is deciding how to depict elements and mapping spatial relations. Ideally elements should be easy to recognize and decipher, associated in some way with what they represent. Spatial relations among elements, especially distance, should reflect conceptual relations in the abstract domain. Animated diagrams have their appeal, yet they turn out to be no more effective than comparable still diagrams across a broad range of content areas in conveying conceptual information. This is partly because animations are typically complex and fleeting, so learners have trouble knowing what to attend to. For this part, learning a foreign language needs a leaning tools, many children choose Rosetta Stone Polish and Rosetta Stone Portuguese to learn Polish and Portuguese. Perhaps more important is that animations are continuous but people think about continuous processes as discrete steps. A well-designed sequence of still diagrams can convey the information essential to each step.

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