Visual Perception

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What Perception Can Tell Us About Learning

If you teach perception, as I did recently[1], it’s impossible not to see the connection between perception and learning. Education often focuses on the importance of active learning—the learning that takes place on a deeper, structural level when students are actively engaged putting ideas together for themselves—but most of us don’t give a second thought to how active perception is. Visual perception—how the mind constructs what we “see”—is one of those perfectly designed systems that hums along doing its job and only gets noticed when the rules of its workings result in an illusion. Perceptual researchers study illusions not only because they are cool (though, admittedly, that is one of the perks) but because illusions can reveal what the rules of perceptual construction are.

Why, as visual communicators, it is of interest to understand the rules of perception to the point that they can be effectively manipulated? The answer is that if we can prod the system into even more active interpretations (constructs) we open the doors for much deeper communication. Rudolph Arnheim [2] illustrated how this kind of mental prodding could take place in the form of poetry. He demonstrated that multiple layers of pattern recognition could compel the mind to form an elegant percept for which there is no (equally elegant) verbal equivalent. His example, from Denise Levertov [3] was:

and as you read

the sea is turning its dark pages,

turning

its dark pages

As Arnheim observed,

“The motion of waves and the turning of pages cannot be fitted in a unitary perceptual situation. Confrontation, however, presses for relation, and under this pressure the common element, the rhythmic turning, comes to the fore in its purity, conveying a sense of elementary nature to the pages of the book and of readability to the waves of the ocean ^[4].”

This is such a highly visual explanation that it is not much of a stretch to see how this kind of multilayered approach would work in visual communication. The more we understand how the visual system constructs our perceptions, the more clearly we can convey even highly complex information directly—so that the mind builds the bridge. And, just as with active learning, if the mind has actively built a percept, the meaning seems to be even deeper and more enduring than if it were absorbed more passively.

There is still a vast amount to be learned about how the mind uses sensory input to construct what we see but we do know that human beings are geniuses at pattern perception—that much of what we see is based on the relationships of inputs. Pattern perception and the organization of vision into coherent wholes was the original focus of the Gestalt Psychologists [5] almost a hundred years ago when they sought determine what the "Laws”[6] of perceptual organization were. Although not all of the rules have been worked out, there is ample evidence that they are not arbitrary. Below is a classic demonstration of perceptual organization:

Most people, when presented with the figure on the left will interpret (see) two overlapping crescent moons. An equally valid interpretation would be to see the two apple core shapes shown on the right, however, viewers usually report that seeing the two abutting apple core shapes takes more effort to see.

Here is another example created by Gaetano Kanizsa [7]:

Once again, it is nearly impossible not to “see” an overlapping square in the middle of the figure on the left whereas the interpretation could just as easily be that there are 5 crosses with corners touching. If you’re interested a great non-technical book that covers a whole variety of perceptual organization rules in a systematic way, try Donald Hoffman’s [8] Visual Intelligence [9].

The problem with trying to communicate or teach without paying attention to how the mind organizes input into patterns that convey meaning is that meaning can so easily be lost. If we want to activate mental construction to give depth to percepts or learning, we need to be careful that the interpretation at the receiving end is not muddled. In the figure below, the hexagonal shape middle can be found in the figures on either side of it:

It’s not easy to see is it?

This example reminds me of the badly designed chemistry lab or poorly designed interface. Too often, a teacher, programmer, or communicator becomes frustrated with the stupidity of a student, user, or receiver when what is at fault is inattention to pattern perception.

Here is a familiar pattern:

Can you just as easily connect the dots as they are shown in the lower figure as in the traditional Little Dipper pattern? I have difficulty connecting the dots in the alternate configuration even when I have the figure squarely in front of me—and I’m supposed to be a “visual” person.

The point of all this is that if we want to tap into active constructions—for visual communication, teaching, interface design, etc.—we need to make sure that we’ve edged our dots into just the right place to activate the meaning we are trying to convey. In order to do this we will have to carefully study how the mind organizes and extracts meaning from patterns.

References

• Rudolph Arnheim (1969). Visual Thinking. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN.

^ Arnheim,62.