Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!gatech!cwjcc!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!cernvax!pan!aratar!chac From: chac@aratar.UUCP (Chuck Clanton) Newsgroups: comp.cog-eng Subject: Re: Murmurs of Earth icons Message-ID: <343@aratar.UUCP> Date: 26 Aug 89 10:15:17 GMT References: Reply-To: chac@aratar.UUCP (Chuck Clanton) Distribution: comp Organization: Adasoft AG, Solothurn, Switzerland Lines: 28 At first glance, I thought that this discussion of the "universality" of icons was circling around the age old Nature-Nurture controversy in psychology. On the one side, neuroscience research has demonstrated that the "atoms" of perception, the basic units by which we perceive the world, are prewired not learned. It certainly seems possible that some simple icons might trip prewired patterns, like the famous Pitts and McCullough(?) paper about the prewiring of the frogs eye to spot flies. Perhaps a universal icon would resemble visual "illusions" that are due to the specifics of the implementation of vision by the human brain. On the other side, a "universal" icon might come from species-wide experience, for example the outline of the breast seen by a baby. Such examples are very hard to find. The variety of human experience is much greater than the commonality; many babies are bottle fed. Thinking about this made me realize another aspect of the reasoning in the icon discussion. If you define an icon as a symbol, then it can have no relationship to the object of the symbol beyond the agreement about its meaning. But, the symbol "icon" refers to something that might sometimes be a sign rather than a symbol. (I am using "sign" here to mean something that actually is related to its referent. The track of an animal is a "sign" of its presence, not a symbol.) So, if an icon is defined to be a symbol, it cannot be universal by definition. But, if I could construct a simple picture that either activates pre-wired perceptual mechanisms in the brain or provokes some association with species-wide experience, then that picture might be a universal icon.