Cognitive science approaches to understanding diagrammatic representations

Through a wide variety of approaches cognitive science has given us various important insights into the nature of diagrammatic representations. This paper surveys the findings, issues and approaches to diagrammatic representations in cognitive science. Important current issues that are highlighted include: the relation between the parts of the representational system that are internal to the mind and in external visual media that presents the diagram; the use of multiple representations which is typical of real contexts of diagram use; the benefits of diagrams in terms of (i) computational offloading, (ii) re-representation and (iii) graphical constraining.