Thread by @SfPRocur

@helenajambor here. A little bit about visual communication. Visual information is all around us, every day, in all of our life’s aspects. And, we are pretty good at decoding it. Most of us understand that in busses seats are reserved for elderly

We also get that for charging our laptop we find a socket under the seat. Even when we are in Czech trains and have no command of Czech

And in the scientific sphere, we get that some manipulation was done with these mice. And possibly this affects their body temperature. (note: the text is harder to understand, PGE?)

Neurobiologists and psychologists studied visual perception and realised: we cannot not see, and: visual information is always immediate.
Here is an exercise, let’s try this on twitter. Look at the next tweet for less than a second, then reply what you saw

NOW:

So, what did you write down? Most people immediately recognise that the picture showed LETTERS of the alphabet.

Most people are able to decode some of the letters and thereby understand the visualization. (in this case: random letters).

All of the roughly 1500 people I tested, also perceive the layout: 3x3, the letters are arranged in a rectangle. Remember, this was only a fraction of a second!

And, absolutely everyone remembers the letters were light in front of a dark background.

While our visual system is FAST, it is also very, very LIMITED: at a given time, we can take up roughly 7 +/- 2 items of visual information. This was described first in the famous "Magic Number 7" rule in a paper by Miller, 1956. Read it! psych.utoronto.ca/users/peterson…

In science, we make use of the power of visual communication when we present figures, explore data, make slides etc. Tomorrow we’ll look at examples for powerful/effective visualizations, and also at some #sadplot 's that could be improved upon.

If you have examples, send them along and we discus them together!