According to the data-frame theory, sensemaking is a macrocognitive process in which people try to make sense of or explain their observations by processing a number of explanatory structures called frames until the observations and frames become congruent. During the sensemaking process, the parietal cortex has been implicated in various cognitive tasks for the functions related to spatial and temporal information processing, mathematical thinking, and spatial attention. In particular, the parietal cortex plays important roles by extracting multiple representations of magnitudes at the early stages of perceptual analysis. By a series of neural network simulations, we demonstrate that the dissociation of different types of spatial information can start early with a rather similar structure (i.e., sensitivity on a common metric), but accurate representations require specific goal-directed top-down controls due to the interference in selective attention. Our results suggest that the roles of the parietal cortex rely on the hierarchical organization of multiple spatial representations and their interactions. The dissociation and interference between different types of spatial information are essentially the result of the competition at different levels of abstraction. 1. Introduction Sensemaking is a complex cognitive activity in which people make sense of or explain their experience or observations. Sensemaking is ubiquitous in humans’ everyday life. Examples of sensemaking include medical diagnosis, scientific discovery, and intelligence analysis. Though it is plausible to argue that the core of sensemaking is abduction (a reasoning process that generates and evaluates explanations for data that are sparse, noisy, and uncertain), there is no doubt that sensemaking is not a primitive neurocognitive process. Rather, sensemaking is comprised of a collection of more fundamental cognitive processes (e.g., perception, attention, learning, memory, and decision making) working together, and certainly involves a group of brain systems from posterior regions to the prefrontal cortex. According to the data-frame theory of sensemaking, people possess a number of explanatory structures, called frames, in which people try to fit the data into a frame and fit a frame around the data, until the data and frame become congruent [1–3]. Sensemaking is called a macrocognitive process in that it involves complex data-frame interactions (e.g., frames shape, define data, data recognize, and mandate frames), and therefore requires coordinated activities from multiple cognitive
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