Design, Adaptation and Convention: The Emergence of Higher Order Graphical Representations

To study the development of graphical conventions we had members of a simulated community play a series of graphical interaction games with partners drawn from the same pool (Experiment 1). Once the community was established, a conventional graphical referring scheme emerged that facilitated high levels of semantic coordination, with reduced communicative effort. Next, a forced choice reaction time study (Experiment 2) demonstrated that the graphical conventions developed in the simulated community offer distinct processing advantages when compared with those developed by isolated pairs (i.e. participants who always interact with the same partner). This is interpreted as evidence that the graphical conventions that evolve within a closed community constitute higher order cognitions, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.