Reasoning with Diagrammatic Representations

We report on the spring 1992 symposium on diagrammatic representations in reasoning and problem solving sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. The symposium brought together psychologists, computer scientists, and philosophers to discuss a range of issues covering both externally represented diagrams and mental images and both psychologyand AIrelated issues. In this article, we develop a framework for thinking about the issues that were the focus of the symposium as well as report on the discussions that took place. We anticipate that traditional symbolic representations will increasingly be combined with iconic representations in future AI research and technology and that this symposium is simply the first of many that will be devoted to this topic. The emphasis of this symposium was diagrammatic (or pictorial) representations in problem solving and reasoning.