Presence and Absence of Individuals in Diagrammatic Logics: An Empirical Comparison

Gem Stapleton; Andrew Blake; James Burton; Anestis Touloumis

doi:10.1007/s11225-017-9711-6

Presence and Absence of Individuals in Diagrammatic Logics: An Empirical Comparison

Gem Stapleton, Andrew Blake, James Burton, Anestis Touloumis

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

The development of diagrammatic logics is stronglymotivated by the desire to make formal reasoning accessible tobroad audiences. One major research problem, for which surprisinglylittle progress has been made, is to understand how to choosebetween semantically equivalentdiagrams from the perspective of human cognition. The particularfocus of this paper is on choosing between diagrams that representeither the presence or absence of individuals.To understand how to best make this choice, we conducted anempirical study. We found thatrepresenting the presence of individuals supported taskperformance either significantly better than, or no worse than,representing the absence of individuals. The particularly strikingfeature of our results was that representing the absence ofindividuals in a way that makes the diagram highly cluttered isdetrimental to human cognition. As a result, diagrams with thisfeature should be avoided, but diagrams using presence(irrespective of diagram clutter) or low-cluttered absence can beused to support cognition in the context of the tasks performed inour study.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	787-815
Number of pages	29
Journal	Studia Logica
Volume	105
Issue number	4
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s11225-017-9711-6
Publication status	Published - 20 Feb 2017

Bibliographical note

© The Author(s) 2017. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Keywords

Individuals
Presence
Absence
Clutter
Cognition
Diagrammatic logics

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10.1007/s11225-017-9711-6Licence: CC BY

Presence and Absence ofFinal published version, 845 KBLicence: CC BY

Andrew Blake
- A.L.Blakebrighton.acuk
- School of Arch, Tech and Eng - Principal Lecturer
- Computing and Mathematical Sciences Research and Enterprise Group
Person: Academic
Anestis Touloumis
- A.Touloumisbrighton.acuk
- School of Arch, Tech and Eng - Principal Lecturer
- Computing and Mathematical Sciences Research and Enterprise Group
Person: Academic

Cite this

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title = "Presence and Absence of Individuals in Diagrammatic Logics: An Empirical Comparison",

abstract = "The development of diagrammatic logics is stronglymotivated by the desire to make formal reasoning accessible tobroad audiences. One major research problem, for which surprisinglylittle progress has been made, is to understand how to choosebetween semantically equivalentdiagrams from the perspective of human cognition. The particularfocus of this paper is on choosing between diagrams that representeither the presence or absence of individuals.To understand how to best make this choice, we conducted anempirical study. We found thatrepresenting the presence of individuals supported taskperformance either significantly better than, or no worse than,representing the absence of individuals. The particularly strikingfeature of our results was that representing the absence ofindividuals in a way that makes the diagram highly cluttered isdetrimental to human cognition. As a result, diagrams with thisfeature should be avoided, but diagrams using presence(irrespective of diagram clutter) or low-cluttered absence can beused to support cognition in the context of the tasks performed inour study.",

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N1 - © The Author(s) 2017. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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Presence and Absence of Individuals in Diagrammatic Logics: An Empirical Comparison

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

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Andrew Blake

Anestis Touloumis

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