Stephen Kosslyn Quotes

6 Sourced Quotes

Bullets are a convenient way to present the separate elements of a list. However, bullets are a bit like salt—often essential to bring out the best, but distasteful if overdone.

Stephen Kosslyn
During the late 1970s and early 1980s there was vigorous debate about the nature of visual mental imagery. One position (championed primarily by Pylyshyn, 1973, 1981) held that representations that underlie the experience of mental imagery are the same type as those used in language; the other position (which my colleagues and I supported, e.g., Kosslyn, 1980, 1994) held that these representations serve to depict, not describe, objects. The debate evolved over time... but always centred on the nature of the internal representations that underlie the experience of visualisation.

Stephen Kosslyn
But because of the way in which depictions represent, there is a correspondence between parts and spatial relations of the representation and those of the object; this structural mapping, which confers a type of resemblance, underlies the way images convey specific content. In this respect images are like pictures. Unlike words and symbols, depictions are not arbitrarily paired with what they represent.

Stephen Kosslyn
Mr. Magoo Rule: Text and graphics must be easily distinguished and recognized. Don ́t make your audience members feel like the vision challenged Mr. Magoo—viewers of an electronic slideshow should not risk eyestrain!

Stephen Kosslyn
Like pictures, images seem to depict information about interval spatial extents. The scanning experiments support the claim that portions of images depict corresponding portions of the represented objects, and that the spatial relations between portions of the image index the spatial relations between the corresponding portions of the imaged objects.

Stephen Kosslyn
Resist the temptation to use special effects. Think about science fiction movies with lots of special effects: If you notice that special effects are special effects, they will fail.

Stephen Kosslyn