Eye movements are like gestures in the creation of informal algorithms
Eye movements are like gestures in the creation of informal algorithms
StatusVoR
Alternative title
Authors
Mackiewicz, Robert
Bucciarelli, Monica
Khemlani, Sangeet
Johnson-Laird, Phil
Monograph
Monograph (alternative title)
Date
2024-06
Publisher
Journal title
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
Issue
Volume
46
Pages
Pages
755-761
DOI
ISSN
1069-7977
ISSN of series
Access date
2024-06-18
Abstract PL
Abstract EN
People who have no experience with programming can create informal programs to rearrange the order of cars in trains. To find out whether they rely on kinematic mental simulations, the current studies examined participants’ eye movements in two experiments in which participants performed various moves and rearrangements on a railway consisting of a main track running from left to right and a siding entered from and exited to the left track. In Experiment 1, they had to imagine different sorts of single moves of cars on the railway. The sequences of their fixations resembled iconic gestures: they tended to look at the starting location of the imagined move, and then at its final location. In Experiment 2, the task was to create descriptions of how to solve four sorts of rearrangements that differ in their Kolmogorov complexity. It predicted the time to find the correct solution and the relative number and duration of fixations recorded during the description of each move for rearrangements of different complexity. Participants were more likely to fixate on the symbols on the cars than anything else, and they fixated longer when the rearrangement was more difficult. They also tended to fixate regions of the tracks where a car’s movement began or ended, as if they were imagining a car moving along the tracks. The results suggest that humans rely on a kinematic mental simulation when creating informal algorithms.
Abstract other
Keywords PL
Keywords EN
abduction
eye movements
informal programming
kinematic mental models
simulations
eye movements
informal programming
kinematic mental models
simulations