Representational Form and Communicative Use

The form of representations is typically considered to be conditioned by three things: the nature and availability of domain regularities, the perceptual and cognitive abilities of individuals, and the properties of the medium used to construct a representation. This paper reports on an experimental investigation of a fourth constraint on representational form; communicative use. Subjects were given a graphical interaction task in which they produced drawings of pieces of music. The results demonstrate that both level of interaction and communicative context have a marked influence on the form of the representations produced. The results parallel findings for dialogue and indicate that communicative use may be a key constraint on representational form.