Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper reports on an exploratory study of diagrammatic reasoning. Concurrent think-aloud protocols and gestures of subjects solving a set of device behavior hypothesis problems presented as labeled diagrams were collected. In addition to analyzing verbal protocols, the gestures and marks made by the subjects were examined and used to annotate encoded verbal data. A model of diagrammatic reasoiung in this task is proposed and compared with results of analyzing the protocols. Besides lending support to results of previous experimental studies, this study also revealed some interesting aspects of diagrammatic reasoning that merit further investigation.