Page 192 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

VISUAL CULTURE

can be seen as a reminder to look beyond words in assessing the relationship
between cognition and visual culture.
For more than a decade, the most prominent conceptual framework for
investigations of the non-verbal aspects of cognitive ability has been Howard
Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences (Gardner 1983, 1993). Gardner’s
basic argument is that intelligence is not a single, largely verbal entity but,
rather, comprises a variety of intellectual abilities, which are not necessarily
correlated with each other. Among the eight or so basic intelligences that
Gardner discusses, there is one in particular, namely, spatial intelligence, that is
directly relevant to any consideration of viewers’ cognitive engagement with
visual media. Spatial intelligence is the ability to form accurate mental represen-
tations of the relationships among objects or parts of objects in two- or three-
dimensional space. Spatial intelligence also encompasses the ability to perform
mental transformations of those relationships. In other words, this is a type of
mental skill that is absolutely crucial in such professions as carpentry or air-
plane navigation, but it also plays a more routine, and often unconscious, role
in many facets of everyday life, whenever we have to interact with physical
structures or orient ourselves in our environment.
It seems reasonable to suppose that spatial intelligence may be enhanced by
one’s dealings with visual media. Gardner appears to take this relationship for
granted, but the assumption is also supported by systematic research, most
notably perhaps in an Israeli study by Tidhar (1984), where fifth-grade
children who were taught movie-making attained a significant increase in
spatial intelligence over the course of a semester (see also earlier related research
by Salomon 1979). A crucial point about Tidhar’s study is that it had to do
with a medium that is commonly used for entertainment, whereas the argu-
ments of Ivins and his successors were concerned mainly with scientific or
informational uses of visual media. In this respect, Tidhar’s study takes us
beyond the realm of professional users of images and points toward the broader,
society-wide concomitants of visual culture. In other words, the study suggests
that the positive impact of visual media on cognitive skills may go beyond
those sectors of the population in which visual media are used as direct aids to
cognition.
An especially intriguing aspect of Tidhar’s findings was the fact that children
who were taught movie-editing experienced a greater improvement in spatial
intelligence than children who were taught camerawork. This finding suggests
that it is the characteristic syntax of movies – their way of carving up reality
into discrete units and reassembling those units according to medium-speci fic
conventions – that may be most conducive to the sharpening of mental skills.
Any movie (or television program, or video) forces us to see reality in a new
and distinctive way. Instead of being immersed in a continuous visual surround,
we are confronted with a succession of sharply delimited visual fragments,
which we ourselves must mentally reassemble into a coherent world, one
which fits together not just spatially but also in terms of narrative logic. It is not

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