Cognitive Theories

Cognitive processes are only partially understood regardless of the substantial research into the many realms that describe cognition, including the physical and chemical properties of the brain, as well as less tangible realms such as the mechanics of meaning, and complex structures that create a "world view." Cognitive research covers a wide range of interests including language and cognitive development, visual thinking and processing, human computer interaction, neural networks, and psychology. Many theories, methods and processes are generated from each of these disciplines, and the student of Information Design benefits from exploring the differences and similarities from each perspective. One area that is particularly significant to Information Design is visual thinking. In Robert Lindstrom's book, Multimedia Presentations, he states that seeing is:

…more than capturing and focusing mental pictures of the physical world…it is a form of sensory reasoning in which the brain receives a constant stream of millions of signals and must quickly translate them into a coherent picture of the physical world. We see color, detect motion, identify shapes, gauge distance and speed, and judge the size of objects, literally in the blink of an eye. (Lindstrom, 1994).

In the book, Jung's Map of the Soul, Murray Stein, quoting Jung, makes the analogy between our physical limits of perception, and the boundaries of our understanding:

…sound frequencies perceptible to the human ear range from 20 to 20,000 vibrations per second; the wave-lengths of light visible to the eye range from 7700 to 3900 angstrom-units. This analogy makes it conceivable that there is a lower as well as an upper threshold for psychic events, and that consciousness…may therefore be compared with the perceptible scale of sound or light, having like them a lower and upper limit. (qtd. Stein, 1998).

Perhaps what we are not able to perceive directly through our senses, we are able to imagine, thereby increasing the boundaries of our understanding of the world around us. Visual thinking may offer new insights into complex problems. In the book, Drawing on the Artist Within, Betty Edwards offers some interesting insights into visual thinking:

Faraday, Galton, Einstein, and certain other noted scientists have reported that they solved scientific problems in visual images and only afterwards translated their thoughts into words. In a famous instance of this, Einstein, unable to reconcile his special theory of relativity with Newtonian physics, pictured a box falling freely down a very long shaft; inside it, an occupant took coins and keys out of his pocket and let them go. The objects, Einstein saw, remained in midair, alongside him, because they were falling at the same rate as he - a situation temporarily identical with being in space, beyond any gravitational field…From this visual construct, Einstein was able to sense some of those seemingly contradictory relationships about movement and rest, acceleration and gravity, that he later put into mathematical and verbal form in his general theory of relativity. (qtd. Edwards, 1986).

Betty Edwards offers another quote concerning visual thinking in the sciences:

In 1992, the great atomic physicist Niels Bohr was mulling over the problems of atom dynamics, which seemed at the time to be at an impasse…Bohr confessed that originally he had not worked out his complex atomic models by classical mechanics; they had come to him 'intuitively…as pictures,' representing events within the atom. (qtd. Edwards, 1986).

Edwards further explores the possibility of the underlying "deep structure" of "visual form" that is "wired into the human brain in a manner similar, perhaps, to the way in which Noam Chomsky has postulated such a structure for human verbal expression." (Edwards, 1986). A visually-based language may be fundamental to our cognitive processes, and this is particularly important in Information Design which emphasizes the visual presentation of information. Research into cognitive processes in the application of Information Design is reflected in many fields, such as teaching, data visualization, usability, and advertising. Each of these disciplines has a different goal in the application of the underlying principles of Information Design - to teach, to inform, to facilitate, or to manipulate and persuade. •