Puck

In a recent series of experiments (reported by Machines Like Us), volunteers read sentences describing everyday actions. The statements were expressed in either first- (“I am…”), second- (“You are…”) or third-person (“He is…”). Volunteers then looked at pictures and had to indicate whether the images matched the sentences they had read. The pictures were presented in either an internal (i.e. as though the volunteer was performing the event him/herself) or external (i.e. as though the volunteer was observing the event) perspective.

The results, reported in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, indicate that we use different perspectives, depending on which pronouns are used. When the volunteers read statements that began, “You are…” they pictured the scene through their own eyes. However, when they read statements explicitly describing someone else (for example, sentences that began, “He is…”) then they tended to view the scene from an outsider’s perspective. Even more interesting was what the results revealed about first-person statements (sentences that began, “I am…”). The perspective used while imagining these actions depended on the amount of information provided — the volunteers who read only one first-person sentence viewed the scene from their point of view while the volunteers who read three first-person sentences saw the scene from an outsider’s perspective.

The researchers note that “these results provide the first evidence that in all cases readers mentally simulate described objects and events, but only embody an actor’s perspective when directly addressed as the subject of a sentence.” The authors suggest that when we read second-person statements (“You are…”), there is a greater sense of “being there” and this makes it easier to place ourselves in the scene being described, imagining it from our point of view.

I just read a great piece by Mandy Brown about reading. While most designers, PR and marketing people and others are pushing site design toward those who scan and search, Brown is thinking about how to make space for readers.

As a reader, I love that. As a designer and PR person pushing pixels around in favor of scanners and searchers, I’m given pause and something to think about.

Despite the ubiquity of reading on the web, readers remain a neglected audience. Much of our talk about web design revolves around a sense of movement: users are thought to be finding, searching, skimming, looking. We measure how frequently they click but not how long they stay on the page. We concern ourselves with their travel and participation—how they move from page to page, who they talk to when they get there—but forget the needs of those whose purpose is to be still. Readers flourish when they have space—some distance from the hubbub of the crowds—and as web designers, there is yet much we can do to help them carve out that space.

Puck says, check it out here. And check out Mandy Brown’s site, this is a working library, too.

“Impossible figures” are visual illusions that take advantage of the brain’s perceptual reasoning skills in order to form geometrical relationships that can’t actually exist in nature. As Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde explain in this article in Scientific American,

The artist M.C. Escher, for instance, depicted reversible staircases and perpetually flowing streams, whereas mathematical physicist Roger Penrose drew his famously impossible triangle and visual scientist Dejan  Todorović created an Elusive Arch that won him Third Prize of the 2005 Best Visual Illusion of the Year Contest…. Several contemporary sculptors recently have taken up the challenge of creating impossible art. That is, they are interested in shaping real-world 3-D objects that nevertheless appear to be impossible. Unlike classic monuments – think of the Lincoln monument – which can be perceived by either sight or touch, impossible sculptures can only be interpreted (or misinterpreted, as the case may be) by the visual mind.

There’s a very cool slideshow that goes along with this article which explains how vantage point is exploited by sculptors in order to trick the brain into perceiving impossible figures in three dimensions.

some notes from an article I wrote on the Visual Reasoning wiki

Engine Summer is set in post-apocalyptic distant future, hundreds of years, at least, after a series of anthropogenic catastrophes, known collectively as the Storm, have reduced human populations to a fraction of their former billions. The teller of Engine Summer is Rush (as in reed), a member of the Little Belaire community, all of whom are “truth speakers.” Truth speakers attempt to communicate in such a way that “they mean what they say, and say what they mean.” One of the ways they do this is by telling lots of stories. As a boy, Rush — Rush that Speaks is his full name — spends time with a “gossip,” a wise woman, named Painted Red.

Storytelling allows for the creation of communal meaning; but by what cognitive means is that accomplished? In as much as Crowley’s novel is a meditation on this question, he seems to argue that the means is through perception. For instance, the young Rush is being counseled by Painted Red while they are both in a heightened state of consciousness thanks to the use of a “rose-colored substance” dabbed on the lips:

What I did notice was that Painted Red’s questions, and then my answers, began to take on bodies somehow. When she talked about something, it wasn’t only being talked about but called into being. When she asked about my mother, my mother was there, or I was with her, on the roofs where the beehives are, and she was telling me to put my ear against the hive and hear the low constant murmur of the wintering bees inside. When Painted Red asked my about my dreams, I seemed to dream them all over again, to fly again and cry out in terror and vertigo when I fell. I never stopped knowing that Painted Red was beside me talking, or that I was answering; but — it was the rose-colored stuff that did, of course, but I wasn’t aware even of that — though I knew that I hadn’t left her side and that her hand was still on mine, still I went journeying up and down my life. (359; references, unfortunately, to an oddball 3-in-1 edition.) Read the rest of this entry »