Visual research methods like photography and digital storytelling are increasingly used in health and social sciences research as participatory approaches that benefit participants, researchers, and audiences. Visual methods involve a number of additional ethical considerations such as using identifiable content and ownership of creative outputs. As such, ethics committees should use different assessment frameworks to consider research protocols with visual methods. Here, we outline the limitations of ethics committees in assessing projects with a (...) class='Hi'>visual focus and highlight the sparse knowledge on how researchers respond when they encounter ethical challenges in the practice of visual research. We propose a situated approach in relation to visual methodologies that encompasses a negotiated, flexible approach, given that ethical issues usually emerge in relation to the specific contexts of individual research projects. Drawing on available literature and two case studies, we identify and reflect on nuanced ethical implications in visual research, like tensions between aesthetics and research validity. The case studies highlight strategies developed in-situ to address the challenges two researchers encountered when using visual research methods, illustrating that some practice implications are not necessarily addressed using established ethical clearance procedures. A situated approach can ensure that visual research remains ethical, engaging, and rigorous. (shrink)

Visual research methods like photography and digital storytelling are increasingly used in health and social sciences research as participatory approaches that benefit participants, researchers, and audiences. Visual methods involve a number of additional ethical considerations such as using identifiable content and ownership of creative outputs. As such, ethics committees should use different assessment frameworks to consider research protocols with visual methods. Here, we outline the limitations of ethics committees in assessing projects with a (...) class='Hi'>visual focus and highlight the sparse knowledge on how researchers respond when they encounter ethical challenges in the practice of visual research. We propose a situated approach in relation to visual methodologies that encompasses a negotiated, flexible approach, given that ethical issues usually emerge in relation to the specific contexts of individual research projects. Drawing on available literature and two case studies, we identify and reflect on nuanced ethical implications in visual research, like tensions between aesthetics and research validity. The case studies highlight strategies developed in-situ to address the challenges two researchers encountered when using visual research methods, illustrating that some practice implications are not necessarily addressed using established ethical clearance procedures. A situated approach can ensure that visual research remains ethical, engaging, and rigorous. (shrink)

Brownfield has become one of the critical issues in modern cities. Over the past few decades, a considerable number of papers on brownfield research have been published. This study reviewed 773 documents themed with “brownfield” in the Web of Science core database between 1980 and 2020 and used the CiteSpace software to sort out the spatial and temporal distribution, knowledge groups, subject structures and hotspot fields, and evolutionary trends of global brownfield research. The analysis focuses on distribution of (...) lead authors and their institutions, high-frequency categories and keywords, high influential journals, author contribution, and evolutionary trends based on coword analysis, coauthor analysis, cocitation analysis, and cluster analysis of documents. On the basis of the aforementioned keywords, clusters, and citation bursts analysis, this paper establishes a multidisciplinary framework for brownfield research, suggesting the main research directions for the future development, which provides theoretical support and practical guidance for the research direction of future brownfield research. (shrink)

The burgeoning interest in arts-informed research and the increasing variety of visual possibilities as a result of new technologies have paved the way for researchers to explore and use visual forms of inquiry. This article investigates how collage making and concept mapping are useful visual approaches that can inform qualitative research. They are experiential ways of doing/knowing that help to get at tacit aspects of both understanding and process and to make these more explicit to (...) the researcher and more accessible to audiences. It outlines specific ways that each approach can be used with examples to illustrate how the approach informs the researcher's experience and that of the audience. The two approaches are compared and contrasted and issues that can arise in the work are discussed. (shrink)

The tension in evidence-based practice and reflective practice -- The relationship between reflection and action research -- An overview of theories of consciousness and unconsciousness -- What do we mean by creativity? -- Using metaphor and symbolism as analysis -- Infinite possibilities of knowing and transformation -- Concluding thoughts; the linkages to action research and critical creativity.

Visual turn and replacement of linear sequential communication with visual analogues cause growing variety of scopic regimes and interest in the topic of visuality. This interest is particularly apparent in Lithuanian academic magazines Santalka and Creativity Studies, which are devoted to the topics of philosophy, creative industries and communication within the creative society. The role of images in mass medias, creative industries, advertisement, urban planning, social mapping, various scopic regimes are often analyzed in Lithuanian academic discourse. Traditional university (...) disciplines are replaced by new, unconventional study programs, such as Creative Industries, Entertainment Industries, New Media Art, Visual Communication etc. Students are learning how to generate images and to understand how they function in mass media, advertising, public relations, public show organization, creative project coordination and other creative industries. (shrink)

Visual programming language is a crucial part of learning programming. On this basis, it is essential to use visual programming to lower the learning threshold for students to learn about artificial intelligence to meet current demands in higher education. Therefore, a 3-h AI course with an RGB-to-HSL learning task was implemented; the results of which were used to analyze university students from two different disciplines. Valid data were collected for 65 students in the Science -student group and 39 (...) students in the Humanities -student group. Independent sample t-tests were conducted to analyze the difference between cognitive styles and computational thinking. No significant differences in either cognitive style or computational thinking ability were found after the AI course, indicating that taking visual AI courses lowers the learning threshold for students and makes it possible for them to take more difficult AI courses, which in turn effectively helping them acquire AI knowledge, which is crucial for cultivating talent in the field of AI. (shrink)

To guide the design direction of emotion regulation products that improve the positive emotions of users, investigation into the correlation between relevant visual factors and multi-dimensional complex emotions is needed. In the present study, an extended product emotion measurement method was adopted to describe the multi-dimensional emotional set of each influencing factor and calculate their weight according to the order. The positive and negative emotion indicators of all influencing factors were compared and the evaluation and ranking factors that affect (...) users’ emotional value of emotion regulation products were analyzed. The experimental results reveal that specific emotion mapping scenes on positive emotion are the most significant among the key factors affecting user emotion. Further, the influence of emotional stickers, interactive data visualization, and text on positive emotions decreased in turn. The influence of emotional text on positive emotion was the lowest. Through investigating the visual factors that affect the psychological emotions of users, the development of emotion regulating products could be guided in a more scientific and reasonable manner. (shrink)

We tested Collerton et al.'s model of visual hallucinations by re-examining a data set for correlations between visual hallucinations and measures of attentional function in schizophrenia patients. These data did not support their model. We suggest that cortical hyperexcitability plays an important role in hallucinations, and propose an alternative model that links evidence for cortical hyperexcitability with abnormal neural dynamics.

Drawn sequences of images, like those in comics and picture stories, are a pervasive and fundamental way that humans have communicated for millennia. Yet, the study of visual narratives has only recently gained traction in Cognitive Science. Here we explore what has held back the study of the cognition of visual narratives, and why researchers should join in scholarship of this ubiquitous aspect of expression.

The subject of this article is the works of the Russian artists of the late XIX – early XX centuries in the context of problematic of symbolism and Art Nouveau, as well as the scientific foundation that has developed as yet in studying this topic. Research methodology is based on the conceptual synthesis of classical art history approaches towards the analysis of artistic material with the theoretical interdisciplinary methods of humanities, such as iconology and hermeneutics, as well as the (...) contextual-associative method developed by the author. The goal of this article consists in determination of the peculiarities of symbolism in Russia due to the transformation of the attitude towards the spiritual problematic of art of the turn of the XIX – XX centuries, which is relevant for the modern art history. The author is firs in the Russian art history to conduct a comprehensive analytical overview of the development stages of symbolism in the Russian visual art based on the years-long work with the archival materials, scientific publications, and works of the Art Nouveau authors stored in the museum funds, many of which after 1917 appeared to be on the periphery of attention of art historians due to ideological reasons. The revealed individual characteristics of symbolism as a holistic artistic phenomenon, created on the level of modern humanistic knowledge, determine the novelty of this work and can valuable in further study of symbolism and Art Nouveau. Broadening of representations on the Russian art of the late XIX – early XX centuries, allow returning the heritage of the symbolist artists into the context of art, which is of undeniable importance from the perspective of restoration of natural logic of the development of the history of art in Russia, making this publication valuable in various fields of study of art and culture. (shrink)

In company with its sister volume, Arts-Based Research Across Textual Media in Education explores arts-based approaches to research across media, including film and comics-related material, from a variety of geographic locations and across a range of sub-disciplines within the field of education. This first volume takes a textual focus, capturing process, poetic, and dramaturgical approaches. The authors aim to highlight some of the approaches that are not always centered in arts-based research. The contributors represent a variety of (...) arts-based practices and methods, and they weave this marrying of artistic and scientific expertise and experience into the fabric of the chapters themselves. Authors from international contexts speak to the importance of utilizing artistic approaches for research processes. From multimodal field notes to poetic forms to the dramaturgical, chapters in this book represent steps forward in educational inquiry to bringing together both the creative and credible. The book includes multiple images and rich descriptions shared from the field. This first volume covers amongst other topics: co-created narratives; creative fiction in research; analytic portraits; dramatic representation, and critical poetic inquiry. It would be suitable for graduate students and scholars interested in qualitative inquiry and arts-based methods, in Education and the social sciences. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the international scientific output on postpartum depression research during 2000–2020 through a bibliometric analysis and to explore research hotspots, frontiers, and trends in the field of postpartum depression. We searched the Web of Science Core Collection for publications on postpartum depression published between 2000 and 2020. CiteSpace, gCluto, and other software applications were used to analyze the data by year, journal, and country. A total of 2,963 publications were retrieved and (...) 96 countries or regions published related papers. The United States had the largest number of published papers and the highest betweenness centrality, which is the dominant position in the field of postpartum depression. A total of 717 journals published papers, with the Archives of Womens Mental Health ranked first in terms of volume and betweenness centrality. In this study, 31 high-frequency main MeSH terms/subheadings were selected. The high-frequency MeSH terms were clustered into six categories: an overview of depression-related research, diagnostic and screening scales for postpartum depression, epidemiological investigation into postpartum depression, treatment and drug selection for postpartum depression, psychological research on postpartum depression, and etiology, physiopathology, complications, genetics of postpartum depression. Finally, we used strategic diagram to analyze research trends in postpartum depression. This study has identified a continuous significant increase in the publication of PPD articles. Currently, the etiology, physiological pathology, intervention and treatment of complications on PPD are immature, which provides reference for the trend of obstetric psychology. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThere is a growing body of literature describing conceptual frameworks for working with participatory visual methods. Through a global health lens, this paper examines some key themes within these frameworks. We reflect on our experiences of working with with an array of PVM to engage community members in Vietnam, Kenya, the Philippines and South Africa in biomedical research and public health. The participants that we have engaged in these processes live in under-resourced areas with high prevalence of communicable (...) and non-communicable diseases. Our paper describes some of the challenges that we have encountered while using PVM to foster knowledge exchange, build relationships and facilitate change among individuals and families, community members, health workers, biomedical scientists and researchers. We consider multiple ethical situations that have arisen through our work and discuss the ways in which we have navigated and negotiated them. We offer our reflections and learning from facil... (shrink)

_Seeing the World through Children’s Eyes_ brings an overarching emphasis on ‘seeing’ to early years research and provides an opportunity to see and hear from leading researchers in the field concerning how they work with visual methodologies in their early years research.

Background Despite the bourgeoning of digital tools for bioethics research, education, and engagement, little research has empirically investigated the impact of interactive visualizations as a way to translate ethical frameworks and guidelines. To date, most frameworks take the format of text-only documents that outline and offer ethical guidance on specific contexts. This study’s goal was to determine whether an interactive-visual format supports frameworks in transferring ethical knowledge by improving learning, deliberation, and user experience.Methods An experimental comparative study (...) was conducted with a pre-, mid-, and post-test design using the online survey platform Qualtrics. Participants were university based early-stage health researchers who were randomly assigned to either the control condition (text-only document) or the experimental condition (interactive-visual). The primary outcome variables were learning, (measured using a questionnaire), deliberation (using cases studies) and user experience (measured using the SED/UD Scale). Analysis was conducted using descriptive statistics and mixed-effects linear regression.Results Of the 80 participants, 44 (55%) used the text-only document and 36 (45%) used the interactive-visual. Results of the knowledge-test scores showed a statistically significant difference between participants’ post-test scores, indicating that the interactive-visual format better supported understanding, acquisition, and application of the framework’s knowledge. Findings from the case studies showed both formats supported ethical deliberation. Results further indicated the interactive-visual provided an overall better episodic and remembered user experience compared with the text-only document.Conclusions Our findings show that ethical frameworks formatted with interactive and visual qualities provide a more pleasing user experience and are effective formats for ethics learning and deliberation. These findings have implications for practitioners developing and deploying ethical frameworks and guidelines (e.g., in educational or employee-onboarding settings), in that the knowledge generated can lead to more effective dissemination practices of normative guidelines and health data ethics concepts. (shrink)

Research on visual attention has uncovered significant anomalies, and some traditional methods may have inadvertently probed peripheral vision rather than attention. Vision science needs to rethink visual attention from the ground up. To facilitate this, for a year I banned the word “attention” in my lab. This constraint promoted a more precise discussion of attention-related phenomena, capacity limits, and mechanisms. The insights gained lead me to challenge attributing to “attention” those phenomena that can be better explained by (...) perceptual processes, are predictable by an ideal observer model, or that otherwise may not require an additional mechanism. I enumerate a set of critical phenomena in need of explanation. Finally, I propose a unifying theory in which all perception results from performing a task, and tasks face a limit on complexity. (shrink)

How should we characterize the functional role of conscious visual experience? In particular, how do the conscious contents of visual experience guide, bear upon, or otherwise inform our ongoing motor activities? According to an intuitive and (I shall argue) philosophically influential conception, the links are often quite direct. The contents of conscious visual experience, according to this conception, are typically active in the control and guidance of our fine-tuned, real-time engagements with the surrounding three-dimensional world. But this (...) idea (which I shall call the Assumption of Experience-Based Control) is hostage to empirical fortune. It is a hostage, moreover, whose safety is in serious doubt. Thus Milner and Goodale (1995) argue for a deep and abiding dissociation between the contents of conscious seeing, on the one hand, and the resources used for the on-line guidance of visuo-motor action, on the other. This ‘dual visual systems’ hypothesis, which finds many echoes in various other bodies of cognitive scientific research, poses a prima facie challenge to the Assumption of Experience-Based Control. More importantly, it provides (I shall argue) fuel for an alternative and philosophically suggestive account of the functional role of conscious visual experience. (shrink)

Business and society researchers, as well as practitioners, have been critiqued for ignoring those with less voice and power often referred to as “fringe stakeholders.” Existing methods used in B&S research often fail to address issues of meaningful participation, voice and power, especially in developing countries. In this article, we stress the utility of visual participatory research methods in B&S research to fill this gap. Through a case study on engaging Ghanaian cocoa farmers on gender inequality (...) issues, we explore how VPR methods may be used by researchers to achieve more inclusive, and thus more credible, stakeholder research that can improve decision making within businesses. Furthermore, we argue that ingrained social and environmental problems tackled by B&S research and the unique context in which they occur may open up new opportunities to develop participatory visual methods for social change. (shrink)

Visual Agnosia is a comprehensive and up-to-date review of disorders of higher vision that relates these disorders to current conceptions of higher vision from cognitive science, illuminating both the neuropsychological disorders and the nature of normal visual object recognition.Brain damage can lead to selective problems with visual perception, including visual agnosia the inability to recognize objects even though elementary visual functions remain unimpaired. Such disorders are relatively rare, yet they provide a window onto how the (...) normal brain might accomplish the complex task of vision. Visual Agnosia reviews a century of case studies of higher-level visual deficits following brain damage, places them in the general context of current neuroscience, and draws relevant conclusions about the organization of normal visual processing. It is unique in drawing on research in cognitive psychology, computational vision, visual neurophysiology, and neuropsychology to interpret the agnosias and draw inferences from them about visual object recognition.Following a historical account of agnosia research, Visual Agnosia offers a taxonomy of a wide range of agnosia syndromes, describing and interpreting the syndromes in terms of the latest theoretical models of visual processing and ultimately bringing them to bear as evidence on a variety of questions in the study of higher vision.Martha J. Farah is Associate Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Visual Agnosia is included in the Issues in Biology of Language and Cognition series, edited by John Marshall. (shrink)

This comprehensively updated and expanded revision of the successful second edition continues to provide detailed coverage of the ever-growing range of research topics in vision. In Part I, the treatment of visual physiology has been extensively revised with an updated account of retinal processing, a new section explaining the principles of spatial and temporal filtering which underlie discussions in later chapters, and an up-to-date account of the primate visual pathway. Part II contains four largely new chapters which (...) cover recent psychophysical evidence and computational model of early vision: edge detection, perceptual grouping, depth perception, and motion perception. The models discussed are extensively integrated with physiological evidence. All other chapters in Parts II, III, and IV have also been thoroughly updated. (shrink)

How should we characterize the functional role of conscious visual experience? In particular, how do the conscious contents of visual experience guide, bear upon, or otherwise inform our ongoing motor activities? According to an intuitive and philosophically influential conception, the links are often quite direct. The contents of conscious visual experience, according to this conception, are typically active in the control and guidance of our fine-tuned, real-time engagements with the surrounding three-dimensional world. But this idea is hostage (...) to empirical fortune. It is a hostage, moreover, whose safety is in serious doubt. Thus Milner and Goodale argue for a deep and abiding dissociation between the contents of conscious seeing, on the one hand, and the resources used for the on-line guidance of visuo-motor action, on the other. This ‘dual visual systems’ hypothesis, which finds many echoes in various other bodies of cognitive scientific research, poses a prima facie challenge to the Assumption of Experience-Based Control. More importantly, it provides fuel for an alternative and philosophically suggestive account of the functional role of conscious visual experience. (shrink)

Visual control of our actions can be unconscious as well as conscious. The book explores unconscious and conscious vision, investigated using psychophysical and brain-recording methods. The book sheds new light on and advances experimental, philosophical, and scholarly research on visual consciousness.

Visual representations (photographs, diagrams, etc.) play crucial roles in scientific processes. They help, for example, to communicate research results and hypotheses to scientific peers as well as to the lay audience. In genuine research activities they are used as evidence or as surrogates for research objects which are otherwise cognitively inaccessible. Despite their important functional roles in scientific practices, philosophers of science have more or less neglected visual representations in their analyses of epistemic methods and (...) tools of reasoning in science. This book is meant to fill this gap. It presents a detailed investigation into central conceptual issues and into the epistemology of visual representations in science. (shrink)

This article addresses a question still frequently posed in the context of UK universities which offer courses in the visual arts: Does the PhD research model of contributing new knowledge fit art,...

Recent philosophical analyses of the epistemic dimension of images in the sciences show a certain trend in acknowledging potential roles of these images beyond their merely decorative or pedagogical functions. We argue, however, that this new debate has yet paid little attention to a special type of pictures, we call ‘visual metaphor’, and its versatile heuristic potential in organizing data, supporting communication, and guiding research, modeling, and theory formation. Based on a case study of Conrad Hal Waddington’s epigenetic (...) landscape images in biology, we develop a descriptive framework applicable to heuristic roles of various visual metaphors in the sciences. (shrink)

Many who suffer from eating disorders claim that they see themselves as “fat”. Despite decades of research into the phenomenon, behavioural evidence has failed to confirm that eating disorders involve visual misperception of own-body size. I illustrate the importance of this phenomenon for our understanding of perceptual processing, outline the challenges involved in experimentally confirming it, and provide solutions to those challenges.

Visual working memory is a construct hypothesized to store a small amount of accurate perceptual information that can be brought to bear on a task. Much research concerns the construct's capacity and the precision of the information stored. Two prominent theories of VWM representation have emerged: slot-based and continuous-resource mechanisms. Prior modeling work suggests that a continuous resource that varies over trials with variable capacity and a potential to make localization errors best accounts for the empirical data. Questions (...) remain regarding the variability in VWM capacity and precision. Using a novel eye-tracking paradigm, we demonstrate that VWM facilitates search and exhibits effects of fixation frequency and recency, particularly for prior targets. Whereas slot-based memory models cannot account for the human data, a novel continuous-resource model does capture the behavioral and eye tracking data, and identifies the relevant resource as item activation. (shrink)

Enterprise Network has increasingly gained popularity in academia. Over the past few decades, a substantial amount of EN studies have been published in China. Drawing upon a sample of 603 papers retrieved from the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index database between 1998 and 2020, this study aims to delve into the status quo, knowledge base, research focus, and evolutionary trends of EN research in China. A multifaceted bibliometric analysis was performed using CiteSpace. The findings mainly indicate that the (...) research on EN in China has a clear development context, and the research content gradually changes from macro to micro. In addition to foreign Social Network theories, the research results of domestic scholars have become the basic knowledge in this field. The research includes these topics: the conceptualization of EN, EN as indicators of enterprise development, EN’s impact on start-ups, mechanisms of EN’s effect and governance of EN. The potential direction for future research has been identified as the integration between EN and other forms of networks, and the structure of EN. (shrink)

The free association method is often employed in marketing research to investigate perceptions of a particular product or brand in different socio-cultural groups of customers. In our research, international and domestic students produced free associations in response to photographs of outdoor billboards from two different locations in one city (city centre and outskirts). The results indicate that free associations can depict qualitative aspects of outdoor billboards like poor quality (relating to the categories of amateurish and fake), problematic content (...) (relating to female stereotypes, gender stereotypes and cultural differences), and that they have the potential to capture the general atmosphere of the neighbourhood (categories of decay, depression, danger and past). (shrink)

First published in 1995, The Visual Brain in Action remains a seminal publication in the cognitive sciences. It presents a model for understanding the visual processing underlying perception and action, proposing a broad distinction within the brain between two kinds of vision: conscious perception and unconscious 'online' vision. It argues that each kind of vision can occur quasi-independently of the other, and is separately handled by a quite different processing system. In the 11 years since publication, the book (...) has provoked considerable interest and debate - throughout both cognitive neuroscience and philosophy, while the field has continued to flourish and develop. -/- For this new edition, the text from the original edition has been left untouched, standing as a coherent statement of the authors' position. However, a very substantial epilogue has been added to the book in which Milner and Goodale review some of the key developments that support or challenge the views that were put forward in the first edition. The new chapter summarizes developments in various relevant areas of psychology, neuroscience and behaviour. It notably supplements the main text by updating the reader on the contributions that have emerged from the use of functional neuroimaging, which was in its infancy when the first edition was written. Neuroimaging, and functional MRI in particular, has revolutionized the field over the past 11 years by allowing investigators to plot in detail the patterns of activity within the visual brains of behaving and perceiving humans. The authors show how its use now allows scientists to test and confirm their proposals, based as they then were largely on evidence accrued from primate neuroscience in conjunction with studies of neurological patients. (shrink)

Lemogne and colleagues offer an interesting extension to their previous work on visual perspective and depression: Individuals at-risk for depression , without a history of mood disorders, report retrieval of positive memories from the 3rd person perspective. Their findings suggest that the retrieval of positive experiences from the 3rd person perspective may be a risk-factor for depression, not just a lingering consequence of it. Their study, however, also reports a genetic association in a severely underpowered sample. Rather than focusing (...) on gene x environment interactions, which large, well-powered studies on related phenotypes have failed to detect, a greater understanding of the phenomenology of visual perspective may be a more fruitful avenue for future research. (shrink)

This paper reports on an analysis of the work of Leni Riefenstahl, and German expressionism, through the use of trans-disciplinary semantic associative search in specialized databased dictionaries1. Within this database space (Kitagawa and Kiyokim 1993), the quantitative data of objects as representation can be visualized by number. While the method of image analysis is qualitative, it is based on a quantitative analysis of visual representation. Through this analysis, Riefenstahl's film Olympia Fest der Vlker is compared with the Nazi ideology (...) of the body image. The film is often categorized as romantic; however, this paper proposes a new interpretation based on theories of Jonathan Crary, and Martin Jay, which are combined using the mechanism of connotation in searching database systems. We proposs that, in the context of Visual Culture Studies, the use of digital technologies may provide new possibilities for research in the humanities. (shrink)

Countless studies have reported that individuals detect threatening/angry faces faster than happy/neutral faces. Two classic views have been used to explain this phenomenon—that negative valence drives the effect, or conversely, that low-level perceptual characteristics of the stimuli are responsible for their rapid detection. In the current review, I question whether dichotomous perspectives are the most parsimonious way to explain a large and inconsistent literature. Further, I argue that nondichotomous, multicomponent accounts for the detection of emotionally valenced stimuli might help take (...) us beyond traditional approaches to visual detection research, and I suggest various ways in which future research can use these newer approaches to more effectively elucidate the mechanisms underlying the rapid detection of emotionally valenced stimuli. (shrink)

Interest in orthographic processing reflects an expansion, not constriction, of the scope of research in visual word recognition. Transposition effects are merely one aspect of investigations into orthographic encoding, while open bigrams can accommodate differences across languages. The target article's inaccurate characterization of the study of orthographic processing is not conducive to the advancement of VWR research.

Visual analytics is a new interdisciplinary field of study that calls for a more structured scientific approach to understanding the effects of interaction with complex graphical displays on human cognitive processes. Its primary goal is to support the design and evaluation of graphical information systems that better support cognitive processes in areas as diverse as scientific research and emergency management. The methodologies that make up this new field are as yet ill defined. This paper proposes a pathway for (...) development of visual analytics as a translational cognitive science that bridges fundamental research in human/computer cognitive systems and design and evaluation of information systems in situ. Achieving this goal will require the development of enhanced field methods for conceptual decomposition of human/computer cognitive systems that maps onto laboratory studies, and improved methods for conducting laboratory investigations that might better map onto real-world cognitive processes in technology-rich environments. (shrink)

The capacity of visual working memory (VWM) refers to the amount of visual information that can be maintained in mind at once, readily accessible for ongoing tasks. In healthy young adults, the capacity limit of VWM corresponds to about three simple objects. While some researchers argued that VWM capacity becomes adult-like in early years of life, others claimed that the capacity of VWM continues to develop beyond middle childhood. Here we assessed whether VWM capacity reaches adult levels in (...) adolescence. Using an adaptation of the visual change detection task, we measured visual working memory capacity estimates in 13 year-olds, 16-year-olds, and young adults. We tested whether the capacity estimates observed in early or later years of adolescence were comparable to the estimates obtained from adults. Our results demonstrated that the capacity of VWM continues to develop throughout adolescence, not reaching adult levels even in 16 year-olds. These findings suggest that VWM capacity displays a prolonged development, similar to the protracted trajectories observed in various other aspects of cognition. (shrink)