Visual Thinking: for Design (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies)

We use the word attention to describe top-down processes.

A useful way of describing the way the brain operates to solve problems is as a set of nested loops. Outer loops deal with generalities. Inner loops process the details. In the outer loop, the brain constructs a set of steps to solve the problem and then executes them:

Some people have tried to use three-dimensional representations for these kinds of things, believing that because we live in a three-dimensional world, three dimensions must be better than two. This argument fails to take into account the fact that we do not perceive three dimensions. Even saying that we perceive 2.5 dimensions is a considerable ex

coarseaction maps of visual space. There are maps with retinal coordinates, body coordinates, and external world coordinates.

Visual searches will take longer if only color coding is used,

designing for narrative is very different from designing for information seeking.

Our sensitivity to motion falls off much less, so we can still see that something is moving out of the corner of our eye, even though the shape is invisible.

The broad framework around which narratives are built has three components: establishing a problem, elaborating a problem, and resolving a problem.

there is very limited pre-processing that is used to direct attention. To understand this is to understand what is easy to see.•