To understand visual communication and doing it effectively, we need to understand how people see. Let’s start with a video from psychology research, which you may have seen in other classes:
This is a classic experiment in visual perception and selective attention, meaning that we ignore irrelevant or incongruous visual information when focused on a task. As we go about the day, we think we’re clearly seeing the world around us. In fact, our brain is always filtering what we see so we don’t become overwhelmed by visual stimuli.
Visual perception is an interdisciplinary research field, meaning our understanding is shaped by research about psychology, biology and physics. Understanding effective visual design starts with understanding how human brains process visual information.
This video introduces key principles of visual perception.
Key ideas
Related slides for reference
Pay attention to your own visual perception skills as you play these games. Spend at least 10 minutes trying out a few of them:
🗨 Describe a game you've played that involves visual perception, such as one of those linked above or a board game or videogame/app. What is one specific visual perception skill you had to use to play the game successfully, and why? Use at least one vocabulary term from the video lecture in your description.
Here is a TEDx talk from one of the researchers involved with the “Invisible Gorilla” studies. Watch from the beginning until 5:10.
✓ What does the word saccade mean, and how does it relate to the bee on the flowers in the TEDx talk? (Hint: Saccade is defined in one of this week’s readings.)
✓ Which of these is an example of selective attention?
To understand how visual perception relates to the media and communication products, we need to distinguish between mediated and unmediated vision. Watch this lecture video:
🗨 What are three things you like or value that you’ve only seen with mediated vision? This could be people, places, objects, etc.
🗨 Describe an experience from your life when seeing something with mediated vs. unmediated vision was discordant. For instance, perhaps something you saw in a photo seemed very different in real life, or perhaps a real-life experience later seemed different in photo or video.
Watch this short video about a robot trained to find Waldo in a Where’s Waldo book. This is an example of how bots can be “taught” to perform image recognition tasks, and it’s meant to be a little silly. But this shows how technology is sometimes better than human vision at certain tasks, while remaining inferior at the tasks that require more interpretation and cultural context.
🗨 What is one other example or skill you can think of where a robot/computer can accomplish a visual perception task more efficiently than a human doing the same task?