Both paintings are similar in that they are framed, portray flowers in a vase against a green background. The paintings differ in that the vases, colors, backgrounds, frames, and positions are not similar. As she looks at a detail in painting B, she can recall similar details in painting A, then shift her perspective back to painting A to confirm her sense of their similarities and differences.

Paramount in Jill's mental experience of the two paintings is her ability to focus her attention on one and then on the other. This can be said to be a basic cognitive operation—focusing attention on something or someone so that an impression of a perceptual experience is registered in the memory as a mental representation of the experience or event. The more intensely Jill focuses her attention or the repeated focusing of her attention on a perception, the more likely it is that she will be able to recall her representation of the event. In the example, Jill shifts the focus of her attention from painting A to painting B. Focusing alternately on A and B allows her to recall one event while attending to the other event. Giulio Benedetti calls this cognitive operation, "presence keeping." He argues that we can keep one mental event present in our consciousness while our attention passes on to a second event ("Basic mental operations which make up mental categories," 2005, 9-10, which is based on the earlier work of Silvio Ceccato). This makes "mapping" cognitively possible.

When we map a past experience onto a present one, as Benedetti argues, we attend to both at the same time. During the course of her comparison, Jill's attention selects particular features of the two paintings for comparison. At first she looked at the paintings holistically. But when she made a particular detail the focus of her attention (focalized or foregrounded), she relegated other details to the periphery of her attention (backgrounded). This enables her to select particular details (the vase, for example) as a mental event embedded in another mental event. Further, Jill can assemble (blend) the various focal events into a generic event-type and categorize them (paintings of flowers in vases against green backgrounds). By shifting the focus of her attention to specific details within the object, Jill can recognize them as parts of a whole (mental modeling). During her experience of comparing the two paintings Jill develops a sense of time passing (sequential scanning) and movements in space (spatial scanning)

The process of comparing is a complex of cognitive operations involving:

• focusing attention

• representing an event in episodic and semantic memory systems

• recalling a past event

• shifting the focus of attention

• mapping one event onto another

• foregrounding-backgrounding the details of an event

• blending events and their foregrounded details into event-types

• blending events and their foregrounded details into event-types

• modeling event-types as actual or virtual experiences

• scanning events sequentially

• scanning events spatially

Notice that the basic cognitive operations are closely related to perception.

(See Fauconnier & Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexitie.)

“Conceptual integration is at the heart of imagination.  It

1. connects input spaces,

2. projects selectively to a blended space,

3. and develops emergent structure through

   1. composition,
      

   2. completion, and  

   3. elaboration in the blend.”

“… mental spaces operate in working memory but are built up partly by activating structures available from long-term memory. Mental spaces are interconnected in working memory, can be modified dynamically as thought and discourse unfold, and can be used generally to model dynamic mappings in thought and language.”  (102)

From Jill’s perspective

input space A = perception A		input space B = perception B

At first she looked at the paintings holistically. But when she made a particular detail the focus of her attention (focalized or foregrounded), she relegated other details to the periphery of her attention (backgrounded). This enables her to select particular details (the vase, for example) as a mental event embedded in another mental event.

Further, Jill can assemble the various focal events into a generic event-type and  blend them together in a recognizable pattern or frame

and categorize them (paintings of flowers in vases against green backgrounds). By shifting the focus of her attention to specific details within the object, Jill can recognize them as parts of a whole (mental modeling)

category: paintings of flowers in vases

By "conceptual integration"

1. connecting input spaces by cross-mapping,

2. projecting selectively to a blended space,

3. and developing an emergent conceptual structure
   

Notice that the conceptual category that “emerges” is a blend of the communalities of the initial inputs and common conceptual “frames” from typical past experiences.  The picture frames, flowers, vases are more abstract than the originals, more schematic.

The model of conceptual blending provides a way of structuring visualizations that mirror the cognitive process.    As we will see in the next section, by interacting with a flash video, the user actually goes through the process it simulates, thus learning a new concept.

The user experiences "images"  (INPUTS) and eventually is coaxed into recognizing the an "image schema" (as a GENERIC INPUT) and then is guided through the blending (to form a BLENDED INPUT) as the the blend is “run” (processed) 

To comprehend the visualization, the user must go through parallel cognitive processes.