Task and Representation Interactions in Temporal Reasoning

Displays used to support tasks involving temporal reasoning often represent temporal information in a format reasonable for computers, but cumbersome for humans. Study participants compared sentences describing relationships between time intervals to either an alpha-numeric or graphical display and responded true/false. Two categories of relationships were examined: relative (before, after) and contained (during, contains). The graphical display allowed faster rejection of instances of categorical mismatch based on perceptual differences and evaluation of truth-conditions at a higher level of abstraction between the two types of relationships