Visual realism: Exploring effects on memory, language production, comprehension, and preference

A ubiquitous part of everyday communication takes place via pictures. For example, people use pictures to show what things look like, how things work, or what can be dangerous. Some of these pictures are less realistic than others: They distort reality by for instance violating what the represented reality looks like, or they present a simplified, schematized version of reality. This dissertation aims to explore whether such distortions of reality in representational pictures influence the way people describe, remember, understand, and learn from these pictures.
This dissertation explores the influence of visual realism from various fields of research, including memory, language production, route descriptions, educational psychology, and information design. In a series of experimental studies, in which participants perceive and cognitively process pictures, effects of visual realism on different kinds of processing are explored and described.
Chapter 1 introduces visual realism in pictures, and hypothesizes how deviations from visual realism may influence cognitive processing. Chapter 2 studies effects of visual realism on object recognition and memory, and the focus is on atypically colored pictures of objects. It is found that color atypicality affects object recognition, and consecutively atypically colored objects are remembered better than typically colored ones under certain circumstances. Chapter 3 introduces similar atypically colored objects in a language production task. Color atypicality is found to have large effects on the production of referring expressions: People mention atypical colors more frequently than typical colors when describing objects in visual context. Chapter 4 also concerns language production, but now in the context of producing route descriptions from maps. Maps are often either visually detailed (i.e., aerial photographs) or consist of schematic graphics, and this difference in visual realism is found to affect the both form and content of route descriptions that people produce. Chapter 5 further explores the differences between photographs and schematic graphics, but now in the context of educational design. Secondary school students are found to benefit from schematization, but experimental results suggest that this benefit is related to schematic pictures employing visual emphasis in pictures, rather than the leaving out of irrelevant visual detail. Finally, Chapter 6 presents a case study on visualizing football statistics, and it explores effects of visually realistic elements and natural metaphors on how people use (and prefer to use) an information display. The final chapter, Chapter 7, presents the conclusions drawn in this dissertation, identifies connections between the experiments in Chapters 2 through 6, discusses limitations of this dissertation and suggestions for future work, and it summarizes methodological and practical implications.
Taken together, the experiments reported in this dissertation present effects of different deviations from visual realism, using stimuli diverging in complexity and usage context, and situated in multiple fields of study. Visual realism is found to have an effect in studies in recognition, memory, language production, learning and comprehension, and information design. All studies in this dissertation, reported in Chapters 2 to 6, offer support for the hypothesis that deviations from visual realism in representational pictures influence how people process these pictures. Deviations of visual realism in pictures, either in terms of color atypicality or as schematization, are found to affect a number of human reactions towards these pictures, and the experiments reported in this dissertation suggest that pictures that deviate from visual realism are processed differently than realistic counterparts.