Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

this paper we outline the first steps of an investigation of the nature of representations information, an investigation that uses as a starting point the various ways in which people tend to communicate different kinds of information. Our hope is that by identifying the regularities of presentation, in particular by finding out when people decide to switch presentation modalities and what they tlien tend to do, we will be able to shed light on the nature of the underlying representations and processes of communication between people.