Before Words: Perception and Cognition

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. Likewise, perception precedes cognition. We see and perhaps feel before we think. In a hyper-mediated environment, how much time do we have to evaluate the images that we see? Roderick Hart suggests that people “may not think past their eyes.”

Images are often put forward as true depictions — we've all heard the saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” suggesting that pictures tell a larger, more accurate story than words can alone. However, pictures are necessarily reductionist because they must focus on specific aspects of a scene. Visuals provide a limited frame through which to see the world, wherein some elements of a scene are highlighted and others are hidden. Because pictures must “capture” a scene, pictures function to reduce the interpretations an audience can make about a scene.

Images are selected among many alternatives and are also edited in ways that mask both the selective attention given to specific scenes as well as the editing itself. So, what is ultimately presented as reality is inevitably a highly selective version of reality. Most importantly, this version of reality will inevitably carry the signatures of its creators, reflecting their perceptions and predispositions and carrying signs of the social and cultural ideologies within which they are operating.