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Keana Barrow
Ottawa University
04/05/2020
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opinion, this is why we need to be better at communicating the truth and our true feelings.
Practicing communication skills and practicing the different ways in which one can communicate
is so important, especially when we go into the real world in our work and professional
environments.
say this because people view things and see things a lot differently than the person next to them.
Visual communication is the process of sending and receiving messages between humans with
our eyes and mental images as the primary delivery of meaning. Visual communication reminds
me a lot about photographers and artists. I think these hobbies and professions prove that a lot of
people see the world differently and have different meanings to what they see. Even though,
scientifically, everyone receives messages the same and it goes through the same process, it
Scientifically and technically, how we perceive messages has to do with our eyes and brains.
There are plenty of different theories on how one perceives messages. One example is Gregory’s
Visual Assumption Theory. His theory relies on top-down processing with is also known as
conceptual- driven processing. This means we look at the bigger picture and make our best guess
of what we see based on expectations, beliefs, prior knowledge, and past experiences. So, we
make up our own assumptions on an image, and Gregory says that we are typically correct in
those assumptions. “Based on Gregory’s theories, we can say that: Nearly 90% of what we see is
lost by the time it reaches our brains. Because of this, the brain has to make its best guess based
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on our past experiences or prior knowledge, the visual information we see is combined with
previously stored information about the world, which we have built up as a result of experience,
and our surroundings help to provide context to the visual information we absorb.” (Fanguy,
2016).
Secondly, there is Sanocki and Sulman’s Color Relations Experiment. Thomas Sanocki
and Noah Sulman conducted an experiment to learn about the impact of color on the visual short-
term memory. In the experiment, they gave people four different types of color patterns and they
were told to rate them harmonious or disharmonious. Based on this study, Sanocki and Sulman
discovered these results: “People remember color patterns better when the color palette is
harmonious, people remember patterns with fewer colors (2-color palettes) better than patterns
with more colors (4-color palettes), and the contrast of surrounding colors impacted how well we
remember the color pattern. In other words, color differences between the content and the
background may enhance our ability to focus our attention on the content itself.” (Fanguy, 2016).
The third theory is the binocular rivalry phenomenon. So, binocular rivalry happens when
our eyes see two different images in the same location. There is one image that dominates and
another that is faded or suppressed. “The dominance alternates periodically, so rather than seeing
a single combination of both visuals at all times, we experience the alternation of the images
over time as the two visuals compete for visual dominance.” There was also an experiment for
this theory and the outcomes for this was: “The fMRI for all observers indicated strong binocular
rivalry when dissimilar visuals were presented and binocular rivalry happens during the visual
processing stage. In other words, during the short period of time when our eyes rest upon two
dissimilar images that are close together, we will not be able to determine what we actually see.”
(Fanguy, 2016).
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Conclusion
These are great examples of the different ways that scholars think we perceive messages.
Although they all had different ideas and backed their hypotheses up with experiments and
results, how we receive and deliver messages can be very familiar. These experiments were
fairly new, so this is something that is still being studied and looked at for more information.
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References
5 Psychology Studies Show How People Perceive Visual Information. (2019, November
perceive-visual-information/
https://howweperceive.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/the-communication-through-image-design-
and-typography/