Inspired by Chang Heavy Industries, I’ve been experimenting with RSVP (Rapid Serial Visual Presentation), which flashes words or images in a rapid sequence.
So I’ve been wondering, what kind of picture is grasped most readily–a line drawing or a bitmap?
The research indicates that our minds turn the continuous bitmap known as seeing into a series of line drawings, so one might expect line drawings to be grasped more readily, since they cut to the chase, as it were.
I’m not so sure. The mind might generate its line drawing more quickly from a bitmap than a pre-existing line drawing.
Maybe a morass of details provides multiple entries to a pattern. Take the face, for example. As soon as we recognize a nose, we can process the details and mentally construct the rest of the face rapidly. And–importantly–the same goes for any individual feature.
So maybe the details aren’t helpful because they are complete, but rather because they provides redundant, start-anywhere access to a pattern.
Details as pattern traction…as a lover of elegant and simple design, I’m resisting this right now.
I’ll venture a guess that high-contrast bitmaps would tap into our lizard brains the fastest. They’re the closest to the “real world”, yet don’t have unnecessary subtlety of gradation. Also, subjects that tap the same prehistoric part of our brains would be recognized faster – like faces and bodies (human or otherwise). You can’t mistake a face at high-noon with shadows in the eye sockets and under the nose.
You’d really enjoy the book “Mind Hacks” with a fascinating section on how our brains process visual information.
Posted by Elliot Mebane on May 25th, 2007.
I’ll check out the book.
High contrast bitmaps are also the standard for beauty, too. When I was learning Photoshop, I was struck by the fact that beautiful pictures followed a very predictable pattern: a high contrast to make big shapes salient, but not so high that it washes away small shapes or textures. Perhaps the pictures right at the sweet spot are beautiful because they offers the most information the fastest.
Posted by matt on May 25th, 2007.