Xref: utzoo alt.hypertext:799 comp.cog-eng:1910 comp.graphics:17012 comp.multimedia:265 comp.software-eng:5224
Newsgroups: alt.hypertext,comp.cog-eng,comp.graphics,comp.multimedia,comp.software-eng
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!ssingh
From: ssingh@watserv1.waterloo.edu (Sneaky Sanj ;-)
Subject: Re: Images vs. Text
Message-ID: <1991Apr3.031013.27762@watserv1.waterloo.edu>
Organization: University of Waterloo
References: <10292@pitt.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Date: Wed, 3 Apr 1991 03:10:13 GMT
Lines: 46

In article <10292@pitt.UUCP> grefen@sun14.cs.pitt.edu (Gregory Grefenstette) writes:
>
>I'm doing work on hypertext visual interfaces and I
>would like to be able to prove what seems evident to me,
>that is,  that people can scan information presented
>in a visual image-based form FASTER than in a plain
>textual form.

Yes, this makes sense. I can process an image IN PARALLEL. I can see a 
picture of a horse and immediately I know it is a horse.

Reading is done in serial, stimulus -> eye -> iconic mem -> short term
-> cognitive processing <=> long term. See, in order to make sense
of the word "horse" involves accessing letters, phonemes, AND THEN
stored images. You can remove some chunks of overhead by using an
image.

That's why people love Macs!! and some of us like Windows too. ;-)

To sum up, reading is comparable to doing floating point in software,
while images is like using an FPU; it exploits hardware we already have.

But text is better in that it is more semantically concentrated, ie. horse
is five bytes, but a gif of a horse could be 50 000 or more. But you
said you wanted throughput...

>But having little psych or human factors background,  
>I don't know of any references that I
>could use,  or even where to begin looking.

Try sci.psychology.

>Please send me some advice about sources for this
>type of research

And post a summary of your replies...

>--Gregory Grefenstette

Ice sez "Sanjay Singh is dead..."

-- 
"No one had the guts... until now!"  
$anjay $ingh     Fire & "Ice"     ssingh@watserv1.[u]waterloo.{edu|cdn}/[ca]
ROBOTRON Hi-Score: 20 Million Points | A new level of (in)human throughput...
!blade_runner!terminator!terminator_II_judgement_day!watmath!watserv1!ssingh!