New Visual World and Future Competencies

The Visual World

Human eyes can detect light stimuli ranging from about 400 nanometer (nm) to 700 nm wavelength. They identify colors, shapes, and depth of the physical environment. With this vision, human beings are able to navigate through the physically visible world consisting of three-dimensional spaces. Human vision has been used as a tool for searching for affordances in the given physical visual environment for more than a million years.

Some scholars argue that the visual world is quite incomplete because it is the world perceived via imperfect human vision. For example, Hermann von Helmholtz argued that human vision, because it is optically poor, gathers poor quality information, and thus makes it difficult to assemble clear images of objects. As Helmholtz said, the human visual world could only be the result of some form of unconscious conclusions we make from incomplete data collected via our vision. As Susan Blackmore and her colleagues posited, it could be a mere illusion constructed out of a vague image of real objects around us.

As James J. Gibson argued, the visual world, with imagination and experience, “is extended in depth; it is upright, stable, and without boundaries; it is colored, shadowed, illuminated, and textured; it is composed of surfaces, edges, shapes, and interspaces; finally, and most important of all, it is filled with things which have meanings” (Gibson, 1950, p. 3). The meanings of our visual world are created from our mental images of what we perceive, visualize, and think. Albert Einstein, for example, is known for creating more or less clear images of some ideas or matters first, and then reproducing and combining those images in his mind before expressing them in words.

Internal visual representations of ideas can be retained in human long-term memory, which is often divided into two types: declarative memory and procedural memory. Declarative memory, conscious memory of facts and events, consists of semantic and episodic memories. Semantic memory holds general factual knowledge that is independent of personal experience and context, whereas episodic memory depicts our personal experiences and specific events and is often encoded and retrieved using visual, olfactory, and auditory areas of the brain because it includes contextual elements of a certain experience or event. This suggests that the visual world is not only a visual entity observed through human vision, but also a world operated, imagined, and created in the human mind and memory. This point is supported by a study conducted by Ilju Rha, which revealed the existence of three dimensions in the visual world created in the human mind: interpretation, operation, and creation. The interpretation dimension involves the use of human vision in understanding and developing a clear perception of certain physical objects or a physical environment human beings face. The operation dimension entails visual operations of those physical objects or environment in human mind. The creation dimension engages the process of meaning making, in which the creation of further visualization, visual fantasies, and dreams is taking place.

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