Thinking Visually

Stephen K. Reed

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000453485
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Thinking Visually documents the many ways pictures, visual images, and spatial metaphors influence our thinking. The book discusses recent empirical, theoretical, and applied contributions that support the view that visual thinking occurs not only where we expect to find it, but also where we do not. Much of comprehending language, for instance, depends on visual simulations of words or on spatial metaphors that provide a foundation for conceptual understanding.

This edition has been fully updated throughout and features new coverage of a range of topical and fascinating areas of research, including aesthetics, visual narratives, communicating health risks, dreams, clinical imagery, mathematical games, and the influence of action on perception. It also features a new chapter on Mixed Reality to showcase the many exciting developments in this area.

The broad coverage, colorful figures, and research discoveries provide a solid foundation for understanding visual thinking across a wide spectrum of activities. It will be an essential read for all students and researchers interested in Visual Thinking.

Part I

Development

Chapter 1

Images Versus Words

DOI: 10.4324/9781003213253-2

I began the first edition of Thinking Visually (Reed, 2010) with the statement “Language is a marvelous tool for communication, but it is greatly overrated as a tool for thought. Because we are constantly exposed to language, we believe that thinking verbally dominates our lives. Thinking visually, if it occurs at all, is hiding in the shadows.”

Research on visual thinking is no longer hiding in the shadows and this second edition provides me with an opportunity to add some of the important findings, theories, and applications that have occurred over the past decade. Thinking visually is important because it provides experiences that interweave throughout our lives. A baby who remembers that his mother hid his toy under a blanket is thinking visually. An investor who tracks the price of a stock on a graph to determine when to buy or sell is thinking visually. A scientist who studies the structure of molecules is thinking visually. An interior decorator who coordinates the colors in a room is thinking visually. A fashion designer who creates a new dress is thinking visually. An athlete who mentally simulates an action before executing it is thinking visually.

Some of the most impressive achievements of humanity have resulted from visual thinking (Miller, 1984; Shepard, 1988). Einstein achieved his remarkable insights into the nature of space and time through mental simulations. He imagined himself traveling through space alongside a beam of light while viewing idealized physical bodies including clocks and measuring rods. Although Einstein’s thought experiments are the most famous examples of the power of visualization in scientific discovery, there are many other examples of how scientific thinking involves visual thinking. High-powered visual thinking also occurred for other scientists such as James Watson and Francis Crick as they constructed molecular models of the structure of DNA. Words such as insight and imagination reflect the power of visual thinking.

Great architecture is also a product of thinking visually. One example, Fallingwater, is a remarkable home that was built in the woods of Pennsylvania. The architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, cantilevered the decks of the home over a waterfall to make it look more like a modern home than one built in the 1930s (Figure 1.1). Wright’s buildings were often more impressive for their visual form than for their function. The visual forms of Wright’s designs are spectacular, as revealed by the horizontal lines of the Robie House in Chicago, the sculptural look of the support columns of the Johnson Wax building in Racine, the Maya Temple design of the Hollyhock House in Los Angeles, and the spiral ramps of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Figure 1.1 Falling water designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

(Photo by Yuhan Du via Unsplash)

The creative designs of the scientist and the architect came together for me in a memorable moment that occurred years ago when I attended a lecture in a newly constructed building for the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. A famous architect named Louis Kahn designed the original buildings. Adding new buildings to the site was highly controversial because many people thought it would infringe upon Kahn’s creation. As I was leaving the new building after the lecture, I had the opportunity to discuss this controversy with Francis Crick, the acting director of the Salk. It was a rare opportunity to hear one brilliant visual thinker talk about the work of another brilliant visual thinker. Crick explained that most of the initial critics were pleased with the outcome. Placing the new buildings some distance from the original ones had preserved the visual integrity of Kahn’s creation.

You may believe by now that I have stacked the deck in favour of visual thinking by discussing the works of famous scientists and architects. So let us look at the contributions of visual thinking to a profession that best captures the creativity of verbal thinking—writing. One of the important talents of gifted writers is their ability to paint pictures with words, as illustrated by a description of a simultaneous sunset and moonrise across the Carolina marshes:

Behind us the sun was setting in a simultaneous congruent withdrawal and the river turned to flame in a quiet dual of gold. The new gold of moon astonishing and ascendant, the depleted gold of sunset extinguishing itself in the long westward slide, it was the old dance of days in the Carolina marshes, the breathtaking death of days before the eyes of children, until the sun vanished, its final signature a ribbon of bullion strung across the tops of water oaks. The moon then rose quickly, rose like a bird from the water, from the trees, from the island, and climbed straight up—gold, then yellow, then pale yellow, pale silver, silver-bright, then something miraculous, immaculate, and beyond silver, a color native only to southern nights.

(Conroy, 1986, p. 5)

Pat Conroy’s sentences from The Prince of Tides come attached with visual images. Other great writers use visual metaphor to make the abstract more concrete, as in the following description of a small town in Kansas:

Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans—in fact, few Kansans—had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.

(Capote, 1965, p. 5)

This description of dramatic events traveling through space, looking for a place to land, indicates that Holcomb, Kansas, is not a likely candidate. But in November 1959 a dramatic event did find Holcomb—and provided the story for Truman Capote’s book, In Cold Blood.

Kaye Gibbons (2006) selects a different spatial metaphor for her book, The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster. Gibbons begins a description of Ellen’s mother with the statement “The hole was emptier than holes with merely nothing in them … ” (p. 66). The power of this metaphor is that it has both an emotional and a cognitive impact. Its emotional impact is the suggestion of abandonment and hopelessness. Its cognitive impact is the dilemma of how one hole can be emptier than others. The complete sentence provides the answer: “The hole was emptier than holes with merely nothing in them, because it was missing everything that had been possible before.” The hole seems emptier because once it was filled.

Thinking with Symbols

If visual thought is so important, why do we place so much emphasis on verbal thought? Steven Pinker (1994) provided an answer in his book, The Language Instinct:

People can be forgiven for overrating language. Words make noise or sit on a page, for all to hear and see. Thoughts are trapped inside the head of the thinker. To know what someone else is thinking, or to talk to each other about the nature of thinking, we have to use—what else, words. It is no wonder that many commentators have trouble even conceiving of thought without words—or is it that they just don’t have the language to talk about it? (p. 67)

Pinker concludes that people do not think in English, Chinese, Apache, or any other language. They think in a language of thought. He proposes that a language of thought probably looks a bit like other languages, consisting of arrangements of symbols that represent concepts. Before considering what these symbols might be, let us look first at what symbols are.

According to the University of Virginia psychologist Judy DeLoache (2004), a symbol is something that someone intends to represent something other than itself. Putting the word something not only once, but twice, into a statement makes the definition difficult to grasp, but she insists that every component of her definition is essential. The word something implies that both the symbol and its referent (what it represents) can be anything—spoken words, printed words, pictures, video images, numbers, graphs, and an infinite list of other possibilities.

The word someone in DeLoache’s definition typically points to humans because according to DeLoache (2004):

Although remarkable success has been achieved teaching non-human primates and some other animals to use certain symbols, the creative and flexible use of a vast array of different types of symbols is unique to humans. The emergence in evolution of the symbolic capacity irrevocably transformed our species, vastly expanding our intellectual horizons and making possible the cultural transmission of knowledge to succeeding generations. (p. 66)

Another important word in the definition is represent. Symbols refer to or denote something. They are not merely associated with their referents. This makes it difficult to determine whether a child’s use or understanding of words is truly symbolic. For example, a young child who says “dog” when seeing a dog or a picture of a dog may only have formed an association based on repeated experience without realizing that the word can represent the object. It is not always easy, even for adults, to know what a symbol represents. What is the intended meaning of a body in the position of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man? Deciphering this mystery is the first of many puzzles faced by Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon in Dan Brown’s (2003) novel The Da Vinci Code.

Finally, the word intends is a crucial part of the definition. Nothing is inherently symbolic. A symbol is created when someone uses it with the goal of denoting or referring to something else. DeLoache (2004) argues that a young child learns that a novel word is a label for an object only when another person is looking or pointing at the object. Pictures also become symbols through experience. A 9-month-old infant may place his lips on the nipple of a depicted baby bottle. By 18 months of age, children treat pictures symbolically as objects of contemplation and communication, rather than as objects to manipulate.

Two types of symbols that are both very important and familiar are words and numbers. The next two sections consider characteristics of each that wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I Development
• Part II Visual Displays
• Part III Images
• Part IV Multimedia Instruction
• Part V Action
• Epilogue
• References
• Index