Spatial metaphor and the logic of visual representation

This paper examines the construction and use of visual representations for reasoning. Visual representations have often been categorized by a resemblance criterion: representations of objects are considered iconic, because they resemble a perceived object, while representations of abstractions, which cannot resemble an object, are considered unconstrained and therefore arbitrary. In contrast, I argue that visual representations used in reasoning exhibit a logic that supersedes resemblance. Humans using visual representations in reasoning map concepts onto spatial structures metaphorically according to a simple but structurally and directionally sensitive rule: features map to features and relations map to relations. This rule can be observed in reasoning tasks with children and adults, and is offered as an explicit heuristic to guide the construction and use of visuospatial representations in reasoning. Arbitrariness, Iconicity, and Metaphor Visual representations, such as pictures, drawings, diagrams, and graphs, may be classified by content, the thing they depict, and format, the way in which they depict something. Concrete visual representations depict perceivable aspects of the environment: objects, people, and scenes. Abstract visual representations, in contrast, depict aspects of the environment which are not directly perceivable -for instance, ideas, concepts, and feelings. A related, but separate, distinction can be made between visual representations which are highly constrained, and those which are unconstrained, or arbitrary. This second distinction is based not on content, but on the rules for construction. These two distinctions have often been confused: iconicity, or the degree to which a representation resembles the thing it depicts, is often contrasted with the arbitrariness of a representation, based on the assumption that visual representations which do not resemble the thing they depict are unconstrained (Fenk, 1994). This amounts to using a resemblance criterion to judge arbitrariness: if a representation does not resemble the thing it depicts, it is arbitrary. Resemblance, however, is not a good indicator of arbitrariness. Representations of objects are to some extent arbitrary, and representations of abstractions are not unconstrained. Objects, for instance, tend to be represented in certain canonical views: pictographs of a face or animal usually depict the object or person in profile (Driver, 1976). Correspondingly, abstract, non-pictorial representation is not completely arbitrary: many abstractions reflect the structure of the external physical world by representing abstract relations metaphorically (Fenk, 1994). Just as Lakoff and Johnson argued that "the logic of a language is based on the coherences between the spatialized form of the language and the conceptual system (1980, p. 138), " abstract visual representations are based on a metaphorical correspondence between spatial structures and conceptual structures. Mapping Features and Relations in Visual