Visual Icons Research Articles

Do red and yellow flags indicate a danger zone?: Exploring Japanese university students’ beach safety behaviour and their perceptions of Australian beach safety signage

BackgroundCoastal drowning is a tragic regular occurrence in Australia, and in the decade 2012–2022, 455 overseas-born beachgoers drowned. Being one of the top five countries of international visitors who drown, Japanese tourists are an at-risk group. This study investigates Japanese university students’ knowledge of beach safety and their perceptions of Australian beach safety signage. MethodsThe present study conducted an online survey with 152 university students in Japan, comprising both closed and open questions. Although the survey was in Japanese, the signage terms used in the survey were in English as used in Australia. Descriptive analysis was conducted on the statistical data via SPSS and deductive thematic analysis was conducted on the open responses using Nvivo. Results90 % of them planned to visit beaches and 64 % would enter the water when or if visiting Australia. However, 60 % interpreted the safer supervised zone denoted by red and yellow flags as signifying a danger zone. Regardless of their English proficiency, almost none fully understood terms commonly used on safety and warning signs such as submerged objects, shore dump, shore break and rip currents, and 60 % of them didn’t know the Japanese term of rip currents, riganryuu. Visual icons were understood much better than these English terms. So what?This study explored a specific (i.e. Japanese) cultural perception and understanding of Australian beach signs beyond the scope of CALD communities. Future studies should continue exploring those of other cultures so Australian beach signs can be revised and improved based on scientific evidence.

An Icon-Based Methodology for the Design of a Prototype of a Multi-Process, Multi-Product, Aggregated Production Planning Software

This paper proposes an icon-based methodology for the design of prototype aggregated production planning software that addresses the complexity of multi-process and multi-product production. Aggregate planning is a critical task in production management, which involves coordinating the production of multiple products in different processes to meet demand efficiently. The approach focuses on the use of visual icons to represent key elements of the production process, such as products, processes, resources, and constraints. These icons allow an intuitive representation of information and facilitate communication between production team members. In addition, this paper presents a conceptual structure that defines the relationships between the icons and how they are used to model and simulate aggregate production planning. The prototype software based on a conceptual foundation allows planners to easily create and adjust production plans in a visual environment. This method improves the ability to make informed and rapid decisions in response to changes in demand or production capacity. The prototype is based on icons and programmed in Excel spreadsheets to facilitate the planner’s planning. At the end of the document, the application of a case study is shown.

Comparison of Auditory and Visual Short-Term Memory Capabilities using a Serious Game Application

A comprehensive serious game application has been designed and implemented to examine the capacity and effective- ness of short-term auditory and visual memory, otherwise known as working memory in human subjects. Participants engaged in an adaptation of the well-known paired association game that entails turning over cards and recalling their placement within a 2D matrix structure of various resolutions. Each trial introduced either visual icons (vision only condition) or auditory objects (audio-only condition). User performance was evaluated through a detailed statistical analysis focusing only on the highest 6x8 resolution condition in the application. Findings suggest that visual memory did not conclusively outperform auditory memory in the context of this game. However, within the scope of auditory stimuli, familiar iconic sounds, such as excerpts of speech and commonplace sounds, were recalled more effectively than unfamiliar, synthetic sounds like parametric waveforms. Furthermore, performance appeared to be influenced by demographic factors, with male and younger subjects yielding superior results.

Keep it real, keep it simple: the effects of icon characteristics on visual search

ABSTRACT Previous research examining how icons’ concreteness, visual complexity, and distinctiveness influence visual search performance have led to disagreements over which icon characteristic most affects behaviour. These icon characteristics are often poorly defined and interrelated, particularly concreteness. Accordingly, drawing strong inferences about the robustness of concreteness as a factor in search for visual icons is challenging. Here, we operationalised concreteness into three distinct levels: concrete icons were images of real-world objects, photorealistic icons were drawings of the object, and abstract icons were images with no conceptual information. Across two experiments, participants rated each icon on various icon characteristics (e.g. concreteness, visual complexity) to provide a ground truth for these factors and to validate our concreteness manipulation. In a separate study, naive participants performed a visual search task for a target icon. Oculomotor measures were utilised to elucidate how various icon characteristics affected search performance. Although we were unable to fully disassociate concreteness from visual complexity, we found that icons high in concreteness improved search performance, but as visual complexity increased, object identification became slower. This was largely demonstrated through increased verification times for complex targets. The present set of studies indicate that highly concrete and simple icons engender search benefits.

Categorization and discrimination of Mandarin lexical tones by naïve English listeners

Unlike tone languages such as Mandarin, English lacks tones at the sub-lexical level. Accordingly, English listeners have difficulty perceptually assimilating tones as categorized or uncategorized native segments (Perceptual Assimilation Model, PAM: Best, 1995). While English listeners can categorize the four lexical tones of Mandarin, i.e., level contour, rising, dipping, and falling, when given question, statement, exclamation, and uncertainty intonations as category choices (So & Best, 2011, 2014), this does not address tone assimilation at the segmental level. We reasoned that they might assimilate tones as non-assimilable nonspeech patterns if given visual icons as tone category choices (flat, rising, dipping, and falling lines, respectively), with no reference being made to English intonation categories. Accordingly, 76 monolingual English listeners (M age = 24.85 years, 50 females) were set two tasks: to use visual icons to categorize Mandarin tones in naturally produced tone-words (/ga, ti, tu, pu/ × 4 tones) and to discriminate all six pairwise tone contrasts. All tone pairs showed ceiling-level discrimination, and listeners split their categorizations of falling and level stimuli between the falling and flat icons, suggesting that when given visual icons, tone-naïve English listeners perceive Mandarin tones as nonspeech acoustic patterns, which is consistent with PAM’s non-assimilation predictions.

Towards a translational landscape: a study of Coloane’s urban features through the lens of translational spaces

ABSTRACT Macao's Coloane is a contested place for intense China-West convergence. The multiplicity and reciprocity of languages, visual icons, and the surrounding geographical features play out to create an ever complicated translational scene in the multilingual urban area of Coloane. This article seeks to explore and theorize the central role of translation in urban signification and imagination. The notion of translational spaces is applied to reveal the multilayered meanings embedded in cross-cultural experiment and existence. By integrating linguistic landscape research, visual studies, and architectural studies into translation studies, the article contributes to the debate on urban language. The concept of translational landscape is proposed as a descriptive and analytical tool to investigate multifaceted translation issues in multilingual cities. Seeing translation as a key epistemological concept and an intercultural practice, this study offers insights into the way translation studies can theorize discursive, semiotic and cultural meanings in respect of cities.

Beyond the Stage: Exploring the Transmedial Adaptation of "to be or not to be" in Hamlet on Rooftop

Comics blend linguistic resources and semiotic signs to represent different ideas. The rise of online platforms and the ease of digital distribution has made the production and consumption of comics a common phenomenon. In storytelling, their significance is acknowledged as an effective source of visual representation of sequential art. The present study underpins different techniques and strategies employed by Eisner for blending art and literary discourse to create an adapted comic version of "Hamlet"—named "Hamlet on a Rooftop". This comic is set in urban settings, in which Eisner highlights the themes of revenge, inner conflicts, family politics, etc. Focusing on the comical adaptation of Hamlet's famous soliloquy "to be, or not to be", the current study delineates how Eisner has used visual icons, facial expressions, colours, lettering, etc., to tell a visual narrative. The study also explores how the use of sequential visual style in "Hamlet on a Rooftop" gives the narrative flow to this comic. The study's findings enlist different techniques that work as a tool kit for comic writers to represent different ideas in an exciting fashion with the help of multimodal semiotic signs.

The Research on the Presentation of Ostalgie in Post-Berlin Wall German Film: Case Study of Goodbye, Lenin!

This paper mainly focus on the presentation of Ostalgie in the film Goodbye, Lenin!. Goodbye, Lenin! is a German tragicomedy directed by Wolfgang Becker, and is popular for its strong historical imprint of German reunification. The representational identities and material nostalgia presented by the film will be analyse though observation of plot design, character setting and visual icons appeared in the film. The main findings of this essay indicates the semiotic portrait of characters of the film enables further evaluation towards the future rather than the past. The role that characteristic of the mother Christine and the space enthusiasm of protagonist Alex play in the film will be reevaluated. The aim of the research is to investigate the way how Goodbye, Lenin! engages with the audience and history as a compromise product of the western-led narrative framework and the celebration of East German identity. Further social impact of this film is also discussed though the positive side of promoting the justification of East-German identity and also the negative side of ignoring the undermined causes that lead to the depreciation of such identity after the German reunification.

Earcons to reduce mode confusions in partially automated vehicles: Development and application of an evaluation method

Partially automated vehicles have systems that can ensure lateral and longitudinal control through adaptive cruise control and lane centering assist, meaning that there are three possible levels (modes) of automation: manual driving, automated longitudinal control, and automated lateral and longitudinal control. Confusions can occur when drivers fail to perceive or comprehend the automation mode indicated by the interface. Earcons reflecting the hierarchy of these automation modes through the use of pitch, rhythm, and number of note variations could improve mode awareness. The goal of the present study was therefore to develop and test a method for assessing the efficiency of earcons as indicators of automation mode, based on a mode awareness model. This method consisted in checking during a controlled laboratory situation, that the earcons were perceived correctly (Experiment 1), comprehended in isolation (Experiment 2), and comprehended during the performance of a parallel visual task that mimicked the visual demand of driving with partial automation and having to react to changes of visual icons (Experiment 3). This method was applied to earcons indicating the hierarchy of automation modes. The results of these experiments indicated that the earcons were efficiently perceived. They were comprehended in isolation and had a provoked a small decrement to a visual task. The parameters used here to create earcons for the purpose of reducing mode confusions were therefore validated to future simulator studies. The method for assessing them could be applied elsewhere, to ensure that other auditory signals adequately contribute to all dimensions of mode awareness before being integrated to a vehicle.

Digital Cognitive Maps for Scientific Knowledge Construction in Initial Teacher Education

Interactive technology offers new opportunities to design dialogic learning spaces and scaffolds with the aid of visual icons. These technological environments can support the construction of open-ended visual cognitive digital maps, which portray an external representation of scientific knowledge that could foster the meaningful resolution of socio-scientific challenges. In this context, this research aims to study the impact of digital cognitive maps on: a) meaningful learning of scientific concepts and b) complex representation of scientific concepts in teacher education. A case study with multi-method analysis was designed. The cognitive maps of 47 teacher education students are analysed, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and before-after their participation in an educational experience that enhances the collaborative construction of digital cognitive maps in order to solve a socio-scientific challenge. The results show that the overall educational experience and, specifically, the scientific inquiry visual scaffolds embedded into the technological environment have a positive impact on learning scientific knowledge and inquiry skills. Furthermore, outcomes also indicate that the experience enriches the students’ representation strategies of complex scientific knowledge and that the construction of cognitive maps with a network architecture increases after the educational experience. Finally, educational implications on the use of interactive technology and cognitive maps for promoting significant learning of content knowledge in pre-service teachers are discussed.

World in the making: On the global visual politics of climate engineering

AbstractProposals for large-scale technical interventions into the Earth system to mitigate global warming – or climate engineering – have sparked considerable debate about their potential implications for international security and global governance. The article furthers this debate by bringing it into dialogue with the literature on visual global politics to develop a more ‘imagistic’ concept of climate engineering imaginaries. Based on a novel visual dataset, three major visual clusters in the public discourse on climate engineering are identified: images of the human–nature relationship, of climate engineering as tangible infrastructure, and of the actors involved in climate engineering projects. The analysis shows how images and other visuals do not only shape the dominant understanding of climate engineering but also competing imaginaries of future political orders in which such approaches might be deployed. Three main results of this analysis stand out. First, dominant ways of seeing climate engineering can further reinforce already dominant discursive frames by adding ‘visual proof’ to their underlying claims. Second, climate engineering visuality can also enable the politicisation of climate engineering by rendering concrete projects visible and hence contestable. Third, climate engineering images can paradoxically limit the scope of imagination as they often revolve around powerful visual icons and symbols of the past and present.

Research on icon design of automotive central control interface for functional semantic cognitive matching

With the development of automotive technology, the complexity and information relevance of the interface of vehicle-mounted interactive systems have been continuously improved. The development of the interface of vehicle-mounted systems has led to the emergence of a large number of functions, and at the same time, visual ICONS representing these functions have also appeared in a large number. However, the disadvantage of this progress is that when drivers use these services, It increases the probability of distraction in the primary task of ensuring safe driving when using these services.In this paper, we propose and validate a method to investigate and optimize icon semantics in safety-critical user interfaces, thus providing icon design insights for matching ICONS and functions to proper usage logic while driving.

The Visual Mandela Effect as Evidence for Shared and Specific False Memories Across People

The Mandela effect is an Internet phenomenon describing shared and consistent false memories for specific icons in popular culture. The visual Mandela effect is a Mandela effect specific to visual icons (e.g., the Monopoly Man is falsely remembered as having a monocle) and has not yet been empirically quantified or tested. In Experiment 1 (N = 100 adults), we demonstrated that certain images from popular iconography elicit consistent, specific false memories. In Experiment 2 (N = 60 adults), using eye-tracking-like methods, we found no attentional or visual differences that drive this phenomenon. There is no clear difference in the natural visual experience of these images (Experiment 3), and these errors also occur spontaneously during recall (Experiment 4; N = 50 adults). These results demonstrate that there are certain images for which people consistently make the same false-memory error, despite the majority of visual experience being the canonical image.

Drawing the Invisible: Comics as a Way of Depicting Psychological Responses to the Pandemic

This graphic article explores the sensory world in the context of pandemic-related mental health issues. While comic artists work in abstract and impressionistic styles to varying degrees, most comic art has been representational. While many artists are adept at rendering facial expressions and body language, these are merely outward manifestations of a character’s mood or emotions. This article explores conveying states of mind less literally, using my own psychological reaction to the pandemic as its subject. I employ visual metaphors, icons, symbols, abstraction, and simplification rather than realistic or highly rendered images in the hopes of better relaying thoughts and emotions.

Mirroring Practice: Poets Respond to Jasper Johns

Mirroring Practice: Poets Respond to Jasper Johns Brian Teare (bio) The first opportunity I had to see a Johns retrospective—at SFMOMA in 2013—I declined. Instead I spent several afternoons in the Jay Defeo retrospective hung in galleries opposite his. That I preferred Defeo had little to do with Johns, whose work I didn’t know. I associated his oeuvre with the male, white, monied bias of museums, and left it at that. I remain grateful I didn’t give his retrospective my time then—that Defeo show was life-changing! And because by the time I was first asked to consider writing about Johns, I had grown less dismissive, if not less wary. Researching Agnes Martin’s art and writing had introduced me to the art world and milieu of Johns’s early years in lower Manhattan, and had resulted in a book, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven. That might be why Carlos Basualdo, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Sarah B. Vogelman, exhibition assistant, asked me to collaborate. We met in the PMA’s curatorial offices during the summer of 2019. Carlos envisioned something elaborate that would take place live in the PMA’s galleries during their half of Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, the other half of which the Whitney would host. He wanted poets to write Johns-inspired poems, since some of his most poignant work of the 1960s references either Modernist poet Hart Crane or New York School poet Frank O’Hara, MOMA curator, art critic, and friend. Carlos envisioned readings that would be performative and perhaps even governed by chance, in honor of John Cage, an early interlocutor and another friend. I was about to leave Philadelphia and couldn’t see how I’d pull anything together from a distance; and though I’d started to familiarize myself with Johns’s long career, I couldn’t yet see what his work might mean to me. I said no with some regret. Two years later I heard again from the PMA, this time from Linnea West, Manager of Adult Public Programs. COVID-19 had delayed the opening of Mind/Mirror, and the museum had decided to move online most of their programming around the retrospective. Would I be interested, Linnea asked, in writing Johns-inspired work, commissioning new poetry from three other poets, and organizing an online reading? This time I said yes, knowing already who I’d ask. Unlike me, Rick Barot, Khadijah Queen, and Cole Swensen have practiced ekphrastic art for most of their careers. I consider myself apprentice to their divergent approaches, the distinctive ways they place poetry in the expanded field of abstract visual art. In bringing us together to work under the sign of Johns, I hoped that our disparate ekphrastic strategies—meditative lyric, gestural collage, lyric essay—might mirror the heterogeneity of Johns’s own career. I was not disappointed. Mind/Mirror prompted some viewers [End Page 94] to ask how Johns, an avowedly apolitical establishment artist, could be relevant now. Our work highlights the fact that poetry at its root—poiein—means to make, and extends the long lively dialogue between painters and poets that includes Johns and O’Hara. Importantly, though, our work expands that dialogue beyond the white gay male coterie that fostered Johns’s early work and includes critical inquiry into the limits of poetic language that mirrors his paint and his canonization. We treat his paintings, biography, and milieu as subject matter, and also treat poetic language as a material with plastic properties like those of paint. Our poems mirror his painting sometimes through traditional representational means—description, figuration, narration—and at other times through radical abstracting tactics—processes of layering, cutting, and scraping—and at other times through their appearance on the page as visual icons. One kind of ekphrasis, Barot argues in “Cross-Hatch,” “is a catalyst for observation, association, and dream . . . like the flaneur’s arc of walking, seeing, and reverie.” Another kind of ekphrasis, Queen suggests in “Collage, unfinished,” “is to make / a mess—unpolished / or profane,” to engage with “the complex play of destruction.” Another kind of ekphrasis, offers...

Mapping the Visual Icon

AbstractIt is often claimed that pre-attentive vision has an ‘iconic’ format. This is seen to explain pre-attentive vision's characteristically high processing capacity and to make sense of an overlap in the mechanisms of early vision and mental imagery. But what does the iconicity of pre-attentive vision amount to? This paper considers two prominent ways of characterising pre-attentive visual icons and argues that neither is adequate: one approach renders the claim ‘pre-attentive vision is iconic’ empirically false while the other obscures its ability to do the explanatory work, which motivates positing pre-attentive visual icons in the first place. With this noted, I introduce the (heretofore unarticulated) notion of an ‘Analogue Map’ and argue that it provides a superior characterisation of pre-attentive vision's iconicity. I then argue that this forces a reassessment of debates which have traditionally presupposed the iconicity of pre-attentive vision, emphasising ramifications for the viability of a format-based perception-thought border.

How Character-Centric Game Icon Design Affects the Perception of Gameplay

Mobile games are developing rapidly as an important part of the national economy. Gameplay is an important attribute, and a game’s icon sometimes determines the user’s initial impression. Whether the user can accurately perceive gameplay and affective quality through the icon is particularly critical. In this article, a two-stage perceptual matching procedure is used to evaluate the perceptual quality of six categories of games whose icons include characters as elements. First, 60 highly visual matching icons were selected as second-stage objects through classification tasks. Second, through the semantic differential method and correlation analysis, highly visual matching icons’ affective matching quality was measured. Finally, a series of icon samples were determined, and element analysis was carried out. Several methods were proposed for improving the perceptual quality of game icons. Studying the perceptual matching relationship can better enhance the interaction between designers, developers, and users.

Infographics and Visually Appealing Slides

Clients and employers are asking for infographics and visually appealing slides because they see infographics everywhere, and slides at conferences and meetings are looking different than in years past. They want graphical elements, short phrases, connections between ideas to be made clear, and to get to the point right away. Putting together these new deliverables means incorporating a few key elements and thinking differently about how you present data. The elements needed are visual (color coding, graphics, and icons), content (timeframes and timelines, statistics, and references), and knowledge (facts and deductions). Infographics come in different sizes: they can be an image of any size or shape, 1 or 2-page 8.5 by 11 sizes, or rolling infographics that are a standard screen width but any length (meant to be scrolled on a website). When creating visually appealing slides, use templates, icons, colors, and images to bring visual interest; put words into boxes, SmartArt, circles, shapes, charts, and graphics; and pare down the words and showcase certain words (often numbers or shorter phrases) with color, size, or space. Create infographics and visually appealing slides using sites or templates available from these sites and from PowerPoint Office 365 to make this process easier. Getting comfortable with these new visual formats might take some time, research, and exposure, but it can be a worthwhile addition to your skillset.

The Omran Daqneesh imagery from the streets of Aleppo to international front pages: Testimony, politics and emotions

This article studies the virality and assigned iconicity of visual icons by examining the roles and interplays between photographers and other media actors contributing to early phases of making and sharing the Omran Daqneesh images from Aleppo, 2016. We draw on theoretical frameworks concerning the mobilization of iconic imagery in today’s digitalized and globalized media landscape as well the interpretive continuum of documentary evidence and emotional appeal typically applied to iconic imagery of children. Empirically, we take our point of departure in interviews with photographers, NGO workers, editors and journalists involved in facilitating, producing and initially disseminating the Omran Daqneesh imagery, to explore how – in contrast to the seemingly straightforward communication offered by visual icons – they are in effect the result of an intricate interplay between these actors, which in different ways and for different reasons contribute to spreading the images and determining their significance and meaning.

Show and Tell

This short piece is a commentary on the collection of experimental interventions at the crossroads of sociology and comics, or comics-based research, published in the current issue of Sociologica. Starting from some of the most relevant aspects that both unite and distinguish the different approaches, it proposes a reflection on how comics, and more broadly drawings, can help expand the sociological imagination. It does so --- through text, drawings and captions --- focusing on the transition between concepts and images, or verbal and visual icons. The comments draw particular attention to these interventions’ diverse but converging plea for visual literacy --- tentatively renamed here imaginacy.