Nature Of Pictures Research Articles

Using eye movements to explore mental representations of space

Visual mental imagery is a cognitive experience characterised by the activation of the mental representation of an object or scene in the absence of the corresponding stimulus. According to the analogical theory, mental representations have a pictorial nature that preserves the spatial characteristics of the environment that is mentally represented. This cognitive experience shares many similarities with the experience of visual perception, including eye movements. The mental visualisation of a scene is accompanied by eye movements that reflect the spatial content of the mental image, and which can mirror the deformations of this mental image with respect to the real image, such as asymmetries or size reduction. The present article offers a concise overview of the main theories explaining the interactions between eye movements and mental representations, with some examples of the studies supporting them. It also aims to explain how ocular-tracking could be a useful tool in exploring the dynamics of spatial mental representations, especially in pathological situations where these representations can be altered, for instance in unilateral spatial neglect.

Fundamental Doubts about the Criteria of Allusion Identification

Rhetoricians have introduced five criteria for the identification of allusion. The aim of this study is to verify the fourth and fifth criteria and to examine their efficiency since they have caused obscurity and confusion in recognition and identification of allusions and created inconsistency between the definitions and the nature of allusions. Regarding the correctness and effectiveness of the fifth criterion, it can be said that allusion is not realized in the form of words or compound words since it involves a compound image that is essentially embodied in an allusive proposition. This proposition enjoys a prime meaning with an actual or imaginary instance and hence it paves the way for the connotative meaning. Allusions, therefore, should be called allusive propositions. Regarding the efficiency and correctness of the fifth criterion, it can be argued that due to the imaginary and pictorial nature of allusion, its surface or prime meaning cannot always be realized in external world. Therefore, the prime meaning of allusion has sometimes an external instance and sometimes an imaginary one. Hence, according to the nature of prime meaning it could be said that there are three kinds of allusive propositions: pictorial allusive propositions whose prime and connotative meanings are realizable in the external world; imaginary allusive propositions whose prime and connotative meanings are imaginable or recognizable in imaginary world; and poetic allusive propositions which contain metonymy, simile and metaphor and their prime meaning is realizable after uncovering the metonymies and metaphors. The prime and connotative meanings of this kind are realizable in the external world or imaginary world.

Visualizing information worldwide a panel proposal to the 2015 ASIS&T annual meeting sponsored by: SIG‐VIS, SIG‐III, & SIG‐HFIS

ABSTRACTTwelve scholars based at information programs worldwide have recently participated in research that asks: How is the concept of information visualized in my community and beyond? The study employed an arts‐informed, visual methodology and the draw‐and‐write technique to stimulate local and global conversations about the pictorial nature of information in society. The work has generated new insights into information as a visual phenomenon and generated an archive of “iSquare” images to be used for information research, education, and practice. As a contribution to the conference theme of “Impact on Society,” this panel introduces the project, describes its technical infrastructure, highlights emerging social scientific and artistic outcomes, and reports cross‐cultural discoveries. The multimedia and interactive session will include in‐person presentations, short videos from collaborators overseas, an expert discussant, dialogue with the audience, and an art exhibition.

The Irony in Pictures

Pictures are sometimes said to be ironic. In many cases this is an error-the error of confusing an ironic picture with a picture of an ironic situation. Nevertheless some pictures are ironic, and there are two interestingly different ways for that to be the case. A picture may be ironic in style, in which case its irony is independent of the context in which it is presented; or a picture may be ironic by virtue of its context of presentation. Having sorted this out, we can solve two problems: why do we often make mistakes about the irony in pictures? The answer has something to do with the nature of pictures themselves. Is the irony which is sometimes represented in a picture ever the product of the picture itself? The answer, yes, shows that there is a closer connection than we might otherwise have thought between the irony of representations and the irony represented in representations.

The Nature of Historia in Leon Battista Alberti's De Pictura

In this article I inquire into Alberti's claim that his treatise, De Pictura (1435), offers a totally new treatment of painting. I argue that the rationale behind Alberti's self-promoting claim derives from his perception of historia, and from his conceptualization of the relationship between this pictorial genre and nature. The historia is not a depiction of the natural, the contingent and the temporal: The nature that Alberti uses for his historia is an ideal nature that cannot, in fact, be observed in nature. Alberti's historia deconstructs natural reality in an attempt to reconstruct the unobservable, fixed principles which lie behind the surface of the visible world. I would also argue, however, that Alberti's historia is neither a mere representation of ideal truths. Rather, it is the means to construct a fixed and ideal social reality. Alberti's historia is not meant to convey a meaning, but rather to create a reality; it is not a representation of an action, but the execution and performance of one. Alberti promotes the use of an artificial system of signs, linear perspective, in order to promote controlled social interactions that in their turn will create an ideal social artifact: a decorous community.

Risk avoidance: Graphs versus numbers

There have long been speculations that graphical and numerical presentations of risk statistics differ in their impact on people's wilingness to pursue actions that could harm or even kill them. But research has been unclear about the processes whereby the pictorial character of graphical displays per se might affect those risky decisions or even whether such effects actually occur. In two studies, we demonstrate that the pictorial nature of a graphical risk display can, indeed, increase risk avoidance. This increase is associated with a heightened impression of the riskiness of less safe alternatives. The results suggest that this picture-driven, intensified sense of riskiness, in turn, rests on two kinds of mechanisms: one cognitive, the other affective. Cognitively, pictorial presentations impose weaker upper bounds on people's internal representations of the chances that riskier alternatives will bring about actual harm. Affectively, pictures ignite stronger, more aversive negative associations with riskier options and their outcomes.

Hidden iconicity: A Peircean perspective on the Chinese picto-phonetic sign

According to Peirce, iconic interpretation is an associative inference on the basis of similarity. In that sense, nearly all Chinese characters are icons. The more obvious support for this claim comes from the pictorial nature of Chinese characters, which are either 'pictographic' or 'indicative'. A better adjective for both is 'ideographic' because they share the same interpretive movement from 'graphs' to 'ideas' that are similar. There is another direction in which a graph can be turned into an icon. Apart from the semantic connection to the refrence, a graph is also related through convention to a particular sequence of sounds which constitute its pronunciation. This has resulted in characters that are 'picto-phonetic' in nature.

Mental imagery: In search of a theory

It is generally accepted that there is something special about reasoning by using mental images. The question of how it is special, however, has never been satisfactorily spelled out, despite more than thirty years of research in the post-behaviorist tradition. This article considers some of the general motivation for the assumption that entertaining mental images involves inspecting a picture-like object. It sets out a distinction between phenomena attributable to the nature of mind to what is called the cognitive architecture, and ones that are attributable to tacit knowledge used to simulate what would happen in a visual situation. With this distinction in mind, the paper then considers in detail the widely held assumption that in some important sense images are spatially displayed or are depictive, and that examining images uses the same mechanisms that are deployed in visual perception. I argue that the assumption of the spatial or depictive nature of images is only explanatory if taken literally, as a claim about how images are physically instantiated in the brain, and that the literal view fails for a number of empirical reasons--for example, because of the cognitive penetrability of the phenomena cited in its favor. Similarly, while it is arguably the case that imagery and vision involve some of the same mechanisms, this tells us very little about the nature of mental imagery and does not support claims about the pictorial nature of mental images. Finally, I consider whether recent neuroscience evidence clarifies the debate over the nature of mental images. I claim that when such questions as whether images are depictive or spatial are formulated more clearly, the evidence does not provide support for the picture-theory over a symbol-structure theory of mental imagery. Even if all the empirical claims were true, they do not warrant the conclusion that many people have drawn from them: that mental images are depictive or are displayed in some (possibly cortical) space. Such a conclusion is incompatible with what is known about how images function in thought. We are then left with the provisional counterintuitive conclusion that the available evidence does not support rejection of what I call the "null hypothesis"; namely, that reasoning with mental images involves the same form of representation and the same processes as that of reasoning in general, except that the content or subject matter of thoughts experienced as images includes information about how things would look.

Processing picture--word stimuli: The contingent nature of picture and of word superiority.

Processing picture--word stimuli: The contingent nature of picture and of word superiority.

Pictorial outcome measures for the hospital care of older patients--a suggested toolkit.

to propose three pictorial methods of presenting hospital outcome data, suitable for use in older patients entering medical specialties (including rehabilitation). 224 patients (mean age 80.6 years, 56% female, 75% emergencies) admitted to a department of medicine for the elderly. PRESENTATIONAL TECHNIQUES: the methods we propose for the presentation of outcome data are (i) place of discharge, using a two-dimensional diagram; (ii) 'survival' analyses, but using discharge from hospital rather than death as the endpoint; and (iii) 'phase diagrams', a novel method of charting the progress of a cohort of patients. To illustrate these methods, the relationship between admission case-mix (with patients put into tertiles on the basis of their Barthel index score) and outcome is shown graphically. each of the three techniques has different relative strengths, but their pictorial nature allows for rapid interpretation of data, showing, for example, the marked influence of case-mix. Separate analyses of subgroups of patients (such as those who die in hospital and those who survive) are also readily attainable by the three methods. the three methods of presenting outcome should be of benefit in comparing the performance of different units, particularly when case-mix is taken into account. The pictorial methods are complementary both to more conventional patient-based methods (mean duration of stay, median duration of stay, percentile duration of stay, regression analyses etc) and to modelling techniques using 'census' data from large numbers of patients.

Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? Some Thoughts on Writing Excessively

I'd like to ask a question of pictures, and the texts that get written about them. What does it mean, I'd like to know, that in the late twentieth century pictures have come to require so much more explanation than they have called for in any previous century? Why do art historians, art critics, and others involved with images find it necessary to write at such length? Why, in the metaphor of my title, have pictures so recently become so puzzling? In a sense this question cannot be asked within art history, since art history's ways of answering it would necessarily have to do with what would be taken to be the fact that pictures are complex, and that the words are merely fitted to their objects. Instead the exponential increases in art history and criticism are probably symptoms and the cause lies elsewhere?ultimately, I will argue, in the general outlines of what pictures have come to mean in the late twentieth century. In a sense, art history's recent interest in self-reflection is not much help here, because historiographie self-criticism leads to emphasis on the differences between rival historical approaches. The question I want to pursue can only make sense if it abandons those differences, and treats essays that would ordinarily be thought to be distant from one another as forms of a single tendency. To guide that synthetic project, I will be making use of an extended comparison between writing about pictures and solving puzzles. It's a deceptive metaphor, not least because it can seem to solve the problem before it is properly posed?as if the answer were to be that pictures have come to need lengthy interpretations because late twentieth-century writers enjoy solving puzzles?but it is useful in large measure because it corresponds to some important ways art historians describe their own methods. The puzzle metaphor helps make it clear how much modernist and postmodernist writers are bedeviled by pictures: how pictures seem to make extravagant demands on the faculties of criticism itself. And that, in turn, helps me toward the conclusion I propose at the end, that the need to see pictures as a kind of object requiring a tremendous effort of interpretation can only be the sign of a concerted resistance to the nonlinguistic nature of pictures.

Descartes's Early Doctrine of Clear and Distinct Ideas

Philosophers since Arnauld have often found the doctrine of clear and distinct ideas, as it figures in works such as the Meditations, distinctly odd and implausible. My aim in this paper is to show that the original version of the doctrine, which Descartes held up to 1628, is very different from the doctrine that is defended in Meditations. I shall argue that the earlier doctrine is both more plausible and more restricted than the later metaphysical doctrine. It is not a doctrine that derives from considerations about our cognitive relation to the external world but one that is concerned rather with the evidential quality of images, not one which concerns itself so much with absolute certainty as with conviction, and the mental images it works with are not the highly abstract ideas of the later writings but vivid pictorial representations. Nevertheless, it is this earlier doctrine that develops into the later doctrine of clear and distinct ideas, and I believe that a number of the severe problems that the later doctrine was subject to derive from the anomalous nature of its origins. I shall not concern myself with the development and transformation of the doctrine after the abandonment of the Regulae in 1628. A study of the early version indicates, however, that the later one is a doomed attempt to convert a good but limited rhetorical-psychological criterion of what constitutes compelling evidence into a criterion which purports to guarantee our cognitive grasp against hyperbolic doubt. Moreover, the pictorial nature of the images to which the early doctrine is directed militates against the view, encouraged by Descartes himself and still widely accepted by commentators, that the doctrine of clear and distinct ideas derives from reflection upon mathematics. In fact, as I shall show, in so far as the early doctrine has a specific bearing upon mathematics, it is actually in conflict with it. But even if the two were in agreement, the source of the doctrine certainly does not lie in mathematics. The source, as I shall show, is ultimately rhetorical-psychological. The Regulae ad directionem ingenii, which were not published until after Descartes's death, were once generally thought to have been composed in 1628. There have, however, always been those who have believed

Three-space representation of phase-mismatch switching in coupled two-state optical systems

A three-space graphical representation for the operation of optical switch/modulators based on two-state systems is reviewed. This visual framework provides insight into the behavior of devices such as the waveguide directional coupler and Mach-Zehnder interferometric switches and combiners and the concept of delta-beta reversal. I is based on the covering map of the group SU(2) onto SO(3) and is analogous to the Poincare formulation for polarization. Because of its pictorial nature, this representation can serve as an aid in the conception of innovative device structures. A class of switches identified using this approach is described and demonstrated by experiment.

Ergonography™: Computer Graphics to Show how People and Equipment Work Together

Ergonographyl™ is a computer graphics tool for visualizing cooperative work involving people and equipment. Icons of people and equipment are arranged on time charts and space charts. The time charts show the sequence of tasks that produces results. The space charts show workspace arrangement and communications links. Ergonography charts can be used for design, decisionmaking, planning, sales, and training. Their pictorial nature solidifies abstract concepts and words. The charts communicate such concepts better than traditional flow diagrams that consist of only boxes and words.

EIN SPIEL GEGEN DIE NATUR

SUMMARY Decision theory is applied to a situation of conflict which a mother of two actually faced in an isolated home in the American Rocky Mountains. While the father was away on a trip which he thought to last seven days, the mother was bitten by a poisonous snake. She thought the bite to be fatal. To spare her two children, aged two months and two years, the agony of death by starvation, she decided to kill them. The mother faced a decision problem under uncertainty. A theoretical analysis of the situation shows which rational decision would have been optimal. However, a rational decision derived in an objective fashion is not free of subjective elements. Assigning utility measures to the possible types of death of the children, suppositions as to nature's strategies, and the choice of one of four established decision criteria are subjective. The criteria of Wald and Savage picture nature as a hostile opponent wanting to inflict greatest possible injury. The difference between them consists merely in the valuation of the disutility of death. Rational behaviour of the mother calls for selecting that strategy which promises the best of the worst possible outcomes. The Hurwicz criterion can accommodate all variations of nature's attitude, from malignant to benignant. According to the mother's optimism a distribution is supposed over nature's most favourable and unfavourable strategies. The probabilities of all other possible strategies are assumed to be zero. The criterion of Laplace assumes an indifferent nature. All possible strategies of nature are equally likely to eventuate. Three strategies are open to the mother, leave both children alive, kill one child, kill both children. Depending on the utility valuations the mother attaches to the different possible types of death, one of these strategies is optimal. If a decision is arrived by the Wald or Savage criterion a mixed strategy is superior to a pure one. The possibility of the childrens survival through the arrival of a stranger only affects the choice of the mother's strategy if she uses the Laplace criterion.

The Reality of Religion

some suppose. There are preachers today beyond middle life who began with the theory of verbal inspiration and inerrancy, and who now believe in inspiration of spirit, not of words, and in the composite authorship and errancy of many books of the Bible, but whose preaching has changed but little. Whether they hold to the literal historicity of the first chapters of Genesis or to their poetical and pictorial nature, what they preach from those chapters is that God created heaven and earth, that man is a responsible agent, that when a man departs from God and yields to the guidance of any lust sin begins, and that death follows sin as a man's shadow follows the man.

XXII. Observations on the Indian method of Picture-Writing by William Bray, Esq. In a Letter to the Secretary

In a memoir lately communicated to the Society by governor Pownall on the origin and nature of picture and elementary writing he observes that he has heard of painting on trees by the Indians in North America, but that he never saw any of them.Recollecting that a gentleman of my acquaintance had shewed me in his journal a copy of an historical painting in figures which he had taken from a tree in North America, I wrote to him, and have been favored with the annexed sketch and interpretation of it.