Projection, Problem Space and Anchoring

Projection, Problem Space and Anchoring David Kirsh (kirsh@ucsd.edu) Dept of Cognitive Science, UCSD La Jolla, CA 92093-0515 Abstract project-create-project cycle. I believe this cycle lies at the heart of much sense making, especially problem oriented sense making. It lies, as well, at the heart of most planning and tangible reasoning. A complete analysis of these phenomena would require the simultaneous study of behavior and brain. My analysis here is confined to the fine grain of behavior, involving scrutiny of the details of what people do when they make sense and reason. In videographic studies of people understanding such things as illustrations, instructions, models and diagrams we found that subjects typically find ways of interacting with at-hand tools and resources – often in creative ways – to help them make sense of those targets. Sometimes these sense-making actions are as simple as gesturing or pointing with hand, body or instrument, muttering while looking, marking or note taking, or shifting the orientation of the target. Sometimes they involve talking with others. When tools are placed near subjects – manipulable things such as rulers, pencils, and physical parts of models – we found subjects regularly use these as ‘things to think with’. They use them to create or supplement local structure to facilitate projection and mental experimentation. This is the heart of the project-create-project cycle: use what is perceived to help you do what you can in your head – namely, try to understand things by projecting possibilities, by somehow augmenting what you see – then externalize part of that mentally projected augmentation so that you free up cognitive resources. This process of externalization simultaneously changes the stimulus and makes it easier to project even deeper. If tools make it easier to externalize what you are thinking, then tools are used. This cycle of projecting, externalizing, then projecting again continues as long as subjects stay focused – though as with any exploratory or epistemic process a subject may soon loop, get stuck, or run out of novel projections. Let me define some terms and properties. When people make sense of situations, illustrations, instructions and problems they do more than just think with their heads. They gesture, talk, point, annotate, make notes and so on. What extra do they get from interacting with their environment in this way? To study this fundamental problem, I looked at how people project structure onto geometric drawings, visual proofs, and games like tic tac toe. Two experiments were run to learn more about projection. Projection is a special capacity, similar to perception, but less tied to what is in the environment. Projection, unlike pure imagery, requires external structure to anchor it, but it adds ‘mental’ structure to the external scene much like an augmented reality system adds structure to an outside scene. A person projects when they look at a chessboard and can see where a knight may be moved. Because of the cognitive costs of sustaining and extending projection, humans make some of their projections real. They create structure externally. They move the piece, they talk, point, notate, represent. Much of our interactivity during sense making and problem solving involves a cycle of projecting then creating structure. Keywords: Projection, interactivity, imagination, sense making, cost structure, externalization, visual thinking, situated cognition. Introduction Why do people typically perform better by staring at a chess board, a tic tac toe board or a geometric proof and project what they might do, rather than memorize the board or proof as it is initially, then close their eyes while they think of possibilities? When subjects consider possible moves in a chess game, one popular account is that they are searching a problem space; they are exploring a purely mental representation of the game’s states, entertaining possible actions and evaluating consequences. This way of speaking leaves unexplained the relation between the physical board that is perceived and the mental process of searching an internal representation. The two might be uncoupled. And in fact, masters rarely need the cognitive support provided by a physical chessboard. They can do all the work in their heads. So a purely mental representation seems apt for them. But less expert players do benefit from a board’s presence. They interactively coordinate their projections – their simulation of what if’s – with the board as they see it outside. Why does a board help them project? How? My real concern here is with interactivity: how, when and why do people interact with their environment when making sense of situations, solving problems and so on. I present a truncated account of what I believe is a key, perhaps the key interactive process in reasoning and sense making: the Projection: The basic idea Projection is a way of ‘seeing’ something extra in the thing present. It is a way of augmenting the observed thing, of projecting onto it. In contrast to perception, which is concerned with seeing what is present, projection is concerned with seeing what is not present but might be. It is sensitive to what is present yet sufficiently controlled by a subject to go beyond what is perceived. In figure 1 two rather different illustrations are displayed. The first – a cartoon – requires subjects to interpret the symbolic meaning of the key elements. The image must be recast as a ‘keyframe’ in a narrative invented by the reader, in this case, a narrative of retirees watching helplessly as