Despite external changes such as those of magnitudes, the functional properties of the visual system also improve with increased age. According to Jean Piaget's centration/decentration theory, the process of perceptual development might continue until adulthood and even after. However, perceptual development should not be understood in all of its…

The processing of mental structures in perception appears to be serial, in that viewers can fill in missing parts from an impoverished stimulus following a top down process. To investigate the effects of unfamiliarity, complexity, and legibility on object and layout perception of unfamiliar stimuli, ten subjects were shown one of four ribbon…

Instructional design is a process that is creative, active, iterative and complex; however, many diagrams of instructional design are interpreted as stifling, passive, lock-step and simple because of the visual elements used to model the process. The purpose of this study was to determine the expressed perceptions of the types of flow diagrams…

Behaviorism cannot adequately explain language processing. A synthesis of the psycholinguistic and information processing approaches of cognitive psychology, however, can provide the basis for a speculative analysis of reading, if this synthesis is tempered by a perceptual learning theory of uncertainty reduction. Theorists of information…

This paper develops a theoretical context for the concept that visual literacy involves a specific type of information processing that has been discussed in the literature on symbolism and epistemology for a number of years. Literacy is discussed first, as a general process of information processing involving the generation of knowledge through…

Contemporary research findings in the fields of perceptual psychology and neurology of the human brain that are directly related to the study of visual communication are reviewed and briefly discussed in this paper. Specifically, the paper identifies those major research findings in visual perception that are relevant to the study of visual…

The difference in cognitive resources required for imagination and perception was tested in two experiments by examining the reduced substitutability of imagination and perception in problem solving by college undergraduates. Eighty subjects in Experiment 1 drew capital letters from lines or descriptions of lines in a seven-page booklet. The…

A total of 100 third and ninth grade students participated in a study to determine how children of different ages perceptually segment a continuing behavior sequence presented on a television program. The children were shown a short segment from a motion picture on a videotape viewer. Following the viewing, the children completed unitizing…

When handled well, description can give poetry and prose a quality of immediacy and accessibility by creating a dramatic context in which the writer's ideas and feelings can be shared by the reader. The use of perception stimulation can aid the student in producing effective images that lead to this dramatic context. To begin this learning…

Perceptual units are involved in the reading process in a particular way. Reading starts with patterns of visual perception visual stimuli in combination with either previously learned information or a strategy for selectively attending to part of the stimuli. Whether the visual pattern selected for deeper information processing is a letter, a…

Individual differences in perceptual information processing were tested using 327 ten year old children, with verbal tasks representing successive information processing and spatial tasks representing simultaneous information processing. Three sets of tasks, (1) visual/reconstruction (V/R), (2) visual/verbal (V/VL), and (3) verbal/reconstruction…