Do We Really Reason about a Picture as the Referent?

A significant portion of the previous accounts of inferential utilities of graphical representations (e.g., Sloman, 1971 ; Larkin & Simon, 1987) implicitly relies on the existence of what may be called inferences through hypothetical drawing. However, conclusive detections of them by means of standard performance measures have turned out to be difficult (Schwartz, 1995). This paper attempts to fill the gap and provide positive evidence to their existence on the basis of eye-tracking data of subjects who worked with external diagrams in transitive inferential tasks.