Anais do IHC'2001 - Departamento de Informática e Estatística - UFSC

Anais do IHC’2001 - IV Workshop sobre Fatores Humanos em Sistemas Computacionais 233
3. what type of mouse interaction protocol to implement to direct learners attention
towards the essential aspects of a concept.” [Sedig et al., 2001, p. 55].
The next section will advance some steps in the direction of answering the above
questions, resorting to a semiotic analysis of the ST interface.
A Semiotic Account of the Super Tangrams’ Interface
The primary theoretical reference of this analysis will be a number of sign classifications
proposed by Peirce [Peirce, 1931-58]. Consolidated accounts of the main aspects of
Peircean Semiotics [Nöth, 1998; Danesi & Perron, 1999] have been used to organize our
analysis and to lead us more effectively to some interesting conclusions.
HCI literature does not provide as many instances of sound semiotic accounts as the
generalized use of such words as icons, indices and symbols would lead us to believe. In
contemporary Semiotics, these terms have technical meanings that originate from one of
the numerous dimensions of sign classifications proposed by Peirce, namely that which
relates different possibilities of representations (representamina) to three universal
phenomenological categories (firstness, secondness, and thirdness). Peirce proposed that
these radical categories could be used to organize all human experience in the world.
Firstness is the category of immediate perception that seizes the presence of phenomena,
but does not relate them to anything else. An example of firstness is the perceptual quality
of redness that emanates from whatever is red. Secondness is the category of association
between two phenomena. Examples of secondness are the (causal) association between rain
and wetness and the (contiguity) association between roads and vehicles. Thirdness is the
category of chained associations, among three or more different phenomena. An example
of thirdness is the (inferential) association that binds the proverbial mortality of Socrates
with his being human and with humans being mortal, found in most introductory lessons to
deductive reasoning. However, thirdness may occur in non-syllogistic chains of
associations such as is the case with the relation between cars, roads and traveling, for
example.
Before we proceed with semiotic definitions, we should go back to our theme and examine
DCM and RDCM interfaces as implemented in ST. We are led to conjecture that
appropriate visual representations of domain concepts should typically figure in
associations that fall in the category of thirdness (or, for the sake of simplification,
argumental chains of association). Should they fail to do so, and yield only associations of
secondness (or, once again for the sake of simplification, mere relatedness), the progressive
path from visual to algebraic concept formulations would be impossible to achieve. The
lack of correspondence between a pair of phenomena (say the current location of a polygon
and a given trajectory of the mouse on screen) and a third one (in this case the length and
direction of a vector originating in the polygon) is precisely what has been reported to be
missing in the learning of children who used the DOM interface.
The three Peircean categories have been used in their day to build a complex philosophical
framework, within which Peirce investigated even the most basic principles of scientific
discovery. Therefore, applying them to the analysis of signs present in different stages of
cognitive or epistemic evolution is not an original endeavor. It leads us to interesting
realizations about the history of scientific knowledge, as in the case of Mendel’s findings
about the principles of heredity [Dennet, 1995]. The path that led Mendel from his