Reading 4:
Section One: Getting Graphics
The Meaning of Pictures:
A great intro on the difference between seeing and processing visual information. It also draws a good point on the fact that artists/designers are more trained to see all the elements on a page, whereas non artists don’t always connect all the visual info, they just look at the main stuff, and in this difference designers may be making things that non artists won’t be perceiving in the same way. Also, miscommunication on the message of an image can be misinterpreted due to so age, gender, culture, ethnicity, etc.
Human Information Processing System:
There are three parts to it: the sensory memory, working memory, and long-term memory. Once we sense things (touch, sight, sound, etc) bits of it get stored in our working/ long-term memory, so that, for the example they used about the Starry Night, when we see it’s image (working memory) past sensory details get pulled up from our working memory like the author’s name, etc.
Visual Perception: Where Bottom-Up Meets Top-Down:
Our eyes process light through the fovea, and beings to make sense of color, detail, and objects. This is Bottom-Up processing. However, the way in which we see the world can be influenced from the Top-Down processing-our intentions, memories, expectations influencing our perception of the world.
Sensory Memory: Fleeting Impressions
With Sensory memory, though fleeting, is broken down into Iconic (any image sensory) and Echoic (any sound sensory) information.
Working Memory: Mental Workspace
Working memory is broken down into the visual and the verbal when we are consciously working on piecing together the sensory information that is our center of attention. If we don’t know what something is, we make inferences about it by comparing it to things we do know (map example). Working Memory is also like a bottleneck, processing things in a limited capacity. We can only process 3-5 things from sensory info at a time, but this weakness could be an advantage in terms of an uncluttered workspace for efficient processing of information.
Cognitive Load: Demands on Working Memory
When there is too much overload, too much info for the working memory to process, it results in failure to interpret or understand information because the working memory process has been too taxed.
Long-Term Memory: Permanent Storage
Selectively paying attention to certain information in working memory is what makes that info sorted into long-term memory for later use. There are different types, like Semantic long term memory (meaning on things, genera facts about the world), Episodic long term memory (events/feelings from those events), and Procedural long term memory (how to do a certain thing).
Encoding: new information is best stored in the long term memory when compared, connected,and elaborately rehearsed.
Depth of Processing: semantically digging deeper to the meaning of new information is always better at storing that new information then encoding at a perceptual level.
Schemes: Mental Representations
Schemas are how an individual’s brain network of representations make sense of the world. Scheme are more like abstract generalized representation, like how when we see a house, we know it’s a house despite how houses can be so different in structure, color, architecture, etc.
Retrieval: Retrieving information Is best done with a retrieval cue that activates the associated memory like an emotion, fact, idea, image, etc. Failure to remember is often a lack of poor retrieval cues rather then a lack of knowledge.
Automaticity:
When a memory or procedure has been done so many times, it becomes automatic, decreasing the load on working memory, like in reading.
Mental Models: This explains cause and effect and these changes are made vs how schemas are jus the underlying structure of memory.
Dual Coding: The Visual and the Verbal
Our brains code both these things separately, but when info learned together like this, it’s better in the long-term memory since more connections are made.
The Audience’s Cognitive Characteristics:
- Development, not age, is more accurate about how cognitive abilities are processed.
- Distractibility: the ability to focus and ignore all the distractions.
- Visual Literacy: decoding the elements in a visual message and stringing it all together.
- Motivation: how much interest a viewer has for a picture.
- Culture: ways of thinking, color interpretation, visual associations with verbal language, etc.
Informative Value:
How every compositional elements in an image can convey a message to the viewer, and how a graphic designer strategically uses them to help a viewer process information.
