Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Most graphic and tabular displays are relational information displays—displays that represent relational information, which is a relation on a set of dimensions. In this paper, we argue that relational information displays are distributed representations—representations that are distributed cross the internal mind and the external environment, and display-based tasks are distributed cognitive tasks—tasks that require the interwoven processing of internal and external information. The basic components of relational information displays are dimensions. Through a theoretical analysis of dimensional representations, we identified four major factors that affect the representational efficiencies of relational information displays: the distributed representation of scale information, the relation between psychological and physical measurements, the interaction between dimensions, and the visual and spatial properties of dimensions. Based on the representational analysis of relational information displays, we proposed a representational taxonomy of relational information displays. This taxonomy can classify most types of relational information displays. In addition, it can be used as a theoretical framework to study the empirical issues of relational information displays in a systematic way.