Before the written word — and possibly even before speech — humans have communicated through drawing. From crude scratches in the dirt or on cave walls to the arcane symbology of the laboratory whiteboard, our instinct for conveying our thoughts visually is pretty extraordinary.

We see or understand something in the world, we build an idea in our mind of what we think we see, and then using our hand and the utensil we re-create it to communicate the share our perception with others. Along the way, we add in our own understanding and experience to craft that communication in ways that might not correspond with a specific object in the world at all.

How we do this — and how we can learn to be better visual communicators — is at the heart of our conversation with Judy Fan, who runs the Cognitive Tools Lab in Stanford University's Department of Psychology.

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Learn More:

Cognitive Tools Lab, Stanford Department of Psychology
Fan, J., et al. (2023) "Drawing as a versatile cognitive tool." Nature Reviews Psychology. (pdf)
Hawkins, R., Sano, M., Goodman, N., and Fan, J. (2023). Visual resemblance and interaction history jointly constrain pictorial meaning. Nature Communications. [pdf]
Fan, J., et al. (2020). Relating visual production and recognition of objects in human visual cortex. Journal of Neuroscience. [pdf]
Fan, J., Yamins, D., and Turk-Browne, N. (2018). Common object representations for visual production and recognition. Cognitive Science. [pdf]
More recent papers

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From doodles to Descartes: sketching and the human cognitive toolkit | Judith Fan

From Our Neurons to Yours

From doodles to Descartes: sketching and the human cognitive toolkit | Judith Fan