When the weather forecaster on the morning news says, "Compared to previous years, this summer is...", when you are swaying on an unfamiliar train and want to check how many more stops you have to transfer at, or when you are choosing a new vacuum cleaner at an electronics store... When we imagine such everyday scenes, an "image" probably comes to mind.
"Although diagrams are treated merely as a supplement to the main text, their influence cannot be underestimated. It is easy to imagine cases where people think they understand the main text by looking at the diagram alone, or where they end up interpreting it incorrectly."
Visual information is easier to understand than verbal explanations and helps people make decisions quickly. Education, business, research... we live in an age where communication using diagrams and tables is common in all fields, but sometimes those diagrams can lead to misunderstandings. This is pointed out by Professor Atsushi Shimojima of the Faculty of Culture and Information Studies at Doshisha University. Professor Shimojima is one of the few leading experts in "visual expression research" in Japan, who has spent many years analyzing diagrams that people tend to interpret intuitively using logical methods and researching effective and correct ways to use them.
In the Faculty of Culture and Information Studies, where research in many fields merges, Professor Shimojima has studied "diagrams" from the perspectives of psychology, design, and mathematical logic. While listening to Professor Shimojima's talk, I would like to consider the function of diagrammatic expression from the perspective of mathematical logic.
How pictures affect thinking
Professor Shimojima is currently working on the role of diagrams in explanatory contexts. The first thing the professor brought up was the difference in ease of understanding when three employees, A, B, and C, are given a verbal explanation of their schedules and you organize it in your head, compared to when you put it in a diagram. "Mr. A and Mr. B work three days a week, every other day, and Mr. C can only work Thursdays and Fridays...It can be hard to understand just by listening to a verbal explanation like that. On the other hand, by illustrating it appropriately, the conclusion can be clearly expressed. Diagrams have the powerful function of organizing premise information and automatically deriving a conclusion."
Professor Shimojima pointed out that an important feature of the diagram is that if you display the premise, the conclusion will automatically appear. By utilizing this feature, even information that is difficult to understand logically can be clearly understood.
In other words, our brains can intuitively understand logical conclusions through diagrams, and by using this property, we can extract information that suits our purposes from complex information. However, at the same time, we must not forget that this property of diagrams can easily lead to major misunderstandings.
Misleading situation
"Everyone is probably familiar with world maps shown using the Mercator projection. It's well known that this is a map that accurately shows the angles relative to latitude and longitude lines, but distances and area ratios are inaccurate. However, people tend to use this world map to imagine the size of countries and continents. This is a misunderstanding that arises from not being fully aware of what information is being encoded, that is, what data is being converted into the format of a map."
For example, if there is a map showing countries that use nuclear power by color, and the entire land area of the United States or Russia is colored, Professor Shimojima points out that many people will intuitively interpret that "nuclear power is widely used in many countries" because of their large area. In reality, however, the areas where nuclear power plants are concentrated are limited. In this way, when visual encoding is confusing, there is a risk that the viewer will reach the wrong conclusion.
There are many cases where the characteristic of diagrams, "if you show the premise, the conclusion will appear," has the opposite effect. This is because the contents of the diagram are often drawn based on incomplete information. For example, the world's first drawing of a dinosaur was encoded by an artist who specialized in drawing animals, based only on the information of a skeletal specimen. The actual color and texture of dinosaurs must have been different, but even now, as new discoveries are made through scientific advances, the "dinosaurs" we imagine are probably not that far removed from the original "image drawings" from over half a century ago.
As such, there is a high possibility that a diagram created from limited information will leave a wrong impression on the reader or viewer, and in order to avoid such misunderstandings, it is important to emphasize the accuracy of the information that is the basis of the diagram. Professor Shimojima calls this "specifying the range of comprehension." This is the act of clearly indicating to what extent information is accurate and to what extent it is written based on speculation or is roughly drawn.
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