Title: Cognitive tools for uncovering useful abstractions
Abstract: In the 17th century, the Cartesian coordinate system was groundbreaking. It exposed the unity between algebra and geometry, accelerating the development of the math that took humans to the moon. It was not just another concept, but a cognitive tool that people could wield to express abstract ideas in visual form, thereby expanding their capacity to think and generate new insights about a variety of other problems. Research in my lab investigates how the mind creates and uses such tools, guided by the hypothesis that even the most rarefied cognitive tools are forged by the need to coordinate perception, cognition, and action in the service of concrete goals. I will begin with an overview of our work investigating drawing—one of humanity's most enduring and versatile cognitive tools. A recurring theme is that what a drawing looks like underdetermines what it means: people produce and interpret drawings at varying levels of abstraction depending on what they can see, what they know, and what they wish to communicate. Next, I will describe an emerging line of work investigating data visualization, a modern cognitive tool used to make sense of phenomena that would otherwise be too difficult to observe directly. I will then share our work using physical assembly tasks as a way to track the emergence of useful abstractions: as people build a structure, they discover procedural abstractions that support planning, and use speech, drawing, and gesture to converge on shared ways of thinking and communicating about the problem. I will close by noting how evaluating AI systems on the same tasks can help to locate human cognition within the broader space of possible solutions to them, and how such studies might inform the development of new tools for expanding people's capacity to learn, share knowledge, and create new things.
Jillian Sifuentes
Email