Logo image
Back
Interpreting Architectural Drawings: The Role of Gaze and Gestures in Cognitive Offloading
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Interpreting Architectural Drawings: The Role of Gaze and Gestures in Cognitive Offloading

Yesol Park, Jakub Krukar, Martin Brösamle, John Gero and Christoph Hölscher
Applied cognitive psychology, v 40(1), e70127
Jan 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.70127
url
https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.70127View
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Open

Abstract

design behavior design cognition drawings embodied cognition representation architectural design
Interpreting architectural drawings requires integrating explicit visual information with inferred spatial relationships, allowing the study of how internal cognitive processes interdepend on external representations. This study examines how gaze behavior and gestures function as cognitive offloading strategies in spatial interpretation tasks. Architecture students analyzed abstract and detailed floor plans of two buildings while interpreting the spatial function of rooms and user movement. Eye‐tracking revealed that abstract drawings elicited more exploratory gaze patterns, while detailed drawings promoted focal attention and longer visual processing. Gesturing was more frequent in abstract drawings and motion tasks, supporting mental simulation of missing information, whereas deictic gestures dominated in the function interpretation of the detailed drawings, reinforcing explicit visual information. These findings suggest that gaze and gestures are jointly used to offload difficult mental transformations. More broadly, this work highlights how external cognition strategies adapt to task demands and representational affordances in spatial reasoning.

Metrics

3 Record Views

Details

Logo image