Visual Communication

Visual communication involves the transmission of information through the visual sensory system, or the eyes and sense of sight. In surveys, visual communication relies heavily on verbal communication (i.e. written text) but can also include nonverbal communication (i.e. through images conveying body language, gestures, or facial expressions) and paralinguistic communication (i.e. through graphical language) (Jenkins, 168). Visual communication can be used to transmit information independently or in combination with aural communication. When conducting surveys, the mode of data collection determines whether information can be transmitted visually, aurally, or both. Whether survey information is transmitted visually or aurally influences how respondents first perceive and then cognitively process information to provide their responses (Dillman, 96).

Visual communication can consist of not only verbal communication but also nonverbal and paralinguistic forms of communication, which convey additional information that reinforces or modifies the meaning of written text (Jenkins, 169). Nonverbal communication (i.e. information transferred through body language, gestures, eye contact, and facial expressions) is most common in face-to-face surveys but can also be conveyed with graphic images in paper and Web surveys. Paralinguistic communication is traditionally thought of as information transmitted aurally through the speaker's voice (e.g., quality, tone, pitch, inflection). However, recent literature suggests that graphical features, such as layout, spacing, font size, typeface, color, and symbols, that accompany written verbal communication can serve the same functions as aural paralinguistic communication. That is, these graphical features and images, if perceived and cognitively processed, can enhance or modify the meaning of written text in paper and Web surveys (Ware, 78).

The process of perceiving visual information can be divided into two broad and overlapping stages: pre-attentive and attentive processing. In pre-attentive processing, the eyes quickly and somewhat effortlessly scan the entire visual field and process abstract visual features such as form, color, motion, and spatial position (Ware, 81). The eyes are then drawn to certain basic visual elements that the viewer distinguishes as objects from other competing elements in the visual field that come to be perceived as background. Once the figure/ground composition is determined, the viewer can start discerning basic patterns among the objects. To distinguish such patterns, the viewer uses the graphical elements of proximity, similarity, continuity and connectedness, symmetry, and closure as described by Gestalt psychology. During pre-attentive processing, the viewer uses a bottom-up model of processing where only stimuli from the visual field itself influence how objects and images are perceived. It ...