Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cognition constrains and influences human cultural productions, among which are information technologies. Information technologies, because of and through their intensive use, can be expected to reflect human cognition particularly well. Cognitive approaches to information technologies have the potential of informing both cognitive science and historical disciplines. Beyond high ecological validity, we demonstrate the relevance of real-world data in testing and informing theories about how the mind works, through four different case studies and contexts: how we represent the world and space around us (Riggsby), how we represent more abstract -number- concepts (Chrisomalis), how we optimize written characters for our visual system (Miton), and coinage to minimize possible errors (Morin). Discussion and moderation will be assured by Valeria Giardino, a philosopher whose main research topic is reasoning with diagrams and the role of cognitive artifacts in improving thought.