Communicating With the Visual Cortex

Vision trumps all other senses.  Why?  Because it’s FAST!  So said Kevin Thorn at this year's Learning Solutions conference in his session "How to Communicate to the Visual Cortex".  It was a great session with tons of good tips.  Let's look at a few...

What we ‘see’ is influenced by shapes and color.  Our eyes see in 2D, then the brain changes it to 3D.  This change takes place in the brain’s visual cortex, which has two sections.

The dorsal cortex is the ‘where & how’ pathway:  it handles motion, represents object locations, and controls eyes and arms for tasks such as reaching.

The ventral cortex is the ‘what’ pathway:  it handles form recognition, object representation, and storage of long term memory.

To effectively use the visual cortex, we need to recognize what learners already know and avoid extra stuff that distracts or confuses. One example was the red ‘X’ button that most people understand closes a window…there should be no need to add extra prompts to click that ‘X’ to close the window, and we should NOT use some other image/text instead of that red ‘X’ to do the same task.

Peripheral vision is another important consideration and provides valid reasons against using blinking or moving animations.  Though our central vision looks directly at things to read and understand, our peripheral vision is always active, looking for moving objects.  The more moving objects there are on the screen, the more distracted learners will become.

In addition to our physical vision, ‘perceived affordances’ affect how we interpret what we see.  An ‘affordance’ refers to the actions that a person can take on an object:  a knob is for turning, a switch is for flipping, etc.  For example, when you see these two doors, do you know how to open them? 

   

           

Of course, pull the handle or push the bar, right?  We know this because the doors’ handles indicate what we should do, pull or push.

However, in online learning, we work with ‘perceived affordances’…the possible actions the user perceives, not the designer.  Perceived affordances can be accounted for in our learning by using design ideas based on visual or previous knowledge our learners have.  For example, if we put a button in our course, make it LOOK like a button:  maybe it’s beveled or rounded, perhaps it has a shadow or highlight.  Whatever you use, be sure it makes the button look and act like a button!

Kevin challenged us to think differently about your design—because, really, everything is just a shape.  For example, a clock can be made of 3 circles, 2 arrows, and 12 small rectangles.  Yep, it’s that simple.  Then you can ‘dress’ it up as needed for your situation.    Vintage images are a good example because they are usually very easy to recreate by putting several shapes together.  They work wonderfully as icons or graphic images because everyone recognizes them.  Here’s an example:  

Everyone knows this means 'phone'...

...not so much with this one.

    
 Successfully communicating with the visual cortex makes our message clearer and decreases the mental load on the learner.  Surely those are goals we all want to meet.