A Perspective on Cross-Cultural Picture Perception11The research and writing of this chapter was supported in part by a graduate fellowship to Jones from the National Science Foundation, and in part by a grant to Hagen from the National Institute of Mental Health, No. R01 MH27947-02. Support of Jones by the Center for Research in Human Learning, University of Minnesota, through grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF/BNS-77-22075) and the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (

People who study visual communication commonly assume that the ability to recognize the content of still or moving images requires prior familiarity with a set of representational conventions. This article argues against this notion. Drawing on recent theoretical developments regarding visual cognition, the article contends that an image's lack of fidelity to visual reality need not impede interpretation by an inexperienced viewer, so long as the image is able to satisfy certain minimal informational requirements of, real‐world vision. An outline of these requirements serves as the basis for a set of predictions about inexperienced viewers’ability to make sense of a variety of representational conventions, and these predictions are checked against available empirical evidence. Since there is in fact considerable research with a bearing on the issues examined here, the article's aim is to provide a theoretical synthesis and explanation of the findings of this research.

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Depiction and recognition

Gallagher¹

2021

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Cited by 3 publications

References 69 publications

The Affordances of Perceptual Inquiry: Pictures are Learned from the World, and What that Fact Might Mean About Perception Quite Generally

The Affordances of Perceptual Inquiry: Pictures are Learned from the World, and What that Fact Might Mean About Perception Quite Generally

Visual "Literacy": A Theoretical Synthesis

Depiction and recognition

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