Conceptual Diagrams: Picturing Naturalistic Decision Making?

Revisit an NDM 18 interactive experience exploring how we visualize decision making, expertise, and cognition beyond boxes and arrows.

How do you represent decision making?

For decades, researchers have used boxes, arrows, flow diagrams, concept maps, and other visual models to represent cognition. These diagrams help us make complex ideas understandable—but they also carry assumptions about how thinking works.

In this NDMA webinar, Robert Hoffman and John Flach revisit an interactive experience first held at NDM 18 to explore how we picture naturalistic decision making, expertise, and macrocognition.

Using familiar examples from cognitive science and NDM, they’ll examine what conventional diagrams help us see, what they may obscure, and how alternative representations might better capture cognition as it unfolds in naturalistic settings.

Participants will be invited to think critically—and creatively—about the models we use to represent decision making and expertise.