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Article published In:
Diagrammatic Reasoning
Edited by Riccardo Fusaroli and Kristian Tylén
[Pragmatics & Cognition 22:2] 2014
► pp. 206–223

Thinking in action

| Columbia Teachers College, Stanford University
| Stanford University
When thought overwhelms the mind, the mind uses the body and the world. Several studies reveal ways that people alone or together use gesture and marks on paper to structure and augment their thought for comprehension, inference, and discovery. The studies show that the mapping of thought to gesture or the page is more direct than the arbitrary mapping to language and suggest that these forms of visual/spatial/action representation are used to “translate” language into mental representations. It is argued that actions in space create patterns in the world that reflect abstractions, that the actions are incorporated into gestures and the patterns into diagrams, a network that integrates gesture, action, the designed world, and abstraction dubbed spraction.
Keywords: diagram, visual communication, gesture, language, thinking, action, design
Published online: 11 December 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.22.2.03tve
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