Imagery and Action • Visual Realism

Research on picture perception and picture-based problem solving has generally considered the information that enables one to "see" and think about a picture's subject matter. However, people often reason about a picture or representation as the referent itself. The question addressed in this work is whether pictorial features themselves help determine when one reasons about the referent of an image, as with an engrossing movie, versus  when one reasons about the image in its own right, as with abstract art. Several different studies have compared adult and children’s reasoning about physical situations ranging from gears and hinges to ratios of juice concentration. A consistent finding has been that when a picture is relatively schematic and impoverished, people tend to reason by making static comparisons of geometric features. However, when a picture is photo-realistic, people tend to reason about physical changes, often through perceptual simulation. Among other things, the results demonstrate that researchers must be cautious when generalizing from reasoning about diagrammatic materials to reasoning about the referents themselves.