Representational interpretive structure: theory and notation

A cognitive theory of the interpretive structure of visual representations (RIST) was proposed by Cheng (2020), which identified four classes of schemas that specify how domain concepts are encoded by graphical objects. A notation (RISN) for building RIST models as networks of these schemas was also introduced. This paper introduces common RIST/RISN network structures – idioms – that occur across varied representations. A small-scale experiment is presented in which three participants successfully modelled their own interpretation of three diverse representations using RIST/RISN and idioms.