Thinking with Networks
Jeffrey V. Nickerson, Barabara Tversky, James E. Corter, Lixiu Yu, Yun Jin Rho, David L. Mason · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2010
Many planning tasks involve complex reasoning about time: what must happen in sequence and what may happen in parallel.One hundred ten online participants were provided with a simple planning scenario (to design a calling tree) and asked to manipulate different diagrammatic representations of the problem.More important than the initial representation was the participants' transformed representations: if time was encoded in the lengths of tree links then inference was more accurate.This finding suggests that diagram transformation may be a useful way to elicit representation strategies, and that such transformations from different starting conditions may be useful as diagnostics and as design aids.