Infomancy Article 9: Two Languages

A picture paints a thousand words.

9 June 2026 · Read the essay →

1. A diagram that would take three paragraphs to describe can land in a second; words make the reader carry the structure in working memory sentence by sentence

   Larkin and Simon, 'Why a Diagram is (Sometimes) Worth Ten Thousand Words', Cognitive Science 11(1), 65-99 (1987)

   Classic 1987 cognitive science paper comparing diagrams with text: diagrams group information by location, cutting search and supporting perceptual inference.

2. A shared mental model is the collective mutual understanding achieved among team members about goals, roles, tasks and processes; a well-constructed one is the cornerstone of a high-performing team (research from the 1990s onwards)

   Satcher, Dees, Johnston, Farid and Khayal, 'Visualized shared mental modeling: an adapted practical framework for interdisciplinary teams solving complex problems in healthcare', BMC Health Services Research (2025)

   A 2025 healthcare paper proposing a practical framework for interdisciplinary teams that build shared mental models with visual tools.

3. Allan Paivio, Canadian psychologist, proposed Dual Coding Theory in the late 1960s (1971): two distinct channels, verbal and nonverbal, independent but capable of working together

   Paivio, Imagery and Verbal Processes (1971); Paivio, 'Why are pictures easier to recall than words?', Psychonomic Science (1968); Paivio, Mental Representations: A Dual Coding Approach (OUP, 1986)

   Paivio's dual coding account of memory: separate but connected verbal and imagery systems, developed at the University of Western Ontario.

4. Cognitive load theory (1988) says instruction must balance intrinsic, extraneous and germane load; Sweller put numbers on cognitive cost

   Sweller, van Merrienboer and Paas, 'Cognitive architecture and instructional design', Educational Psychology Review 10(3), 251-296 (1998)

   The 1998 review that set out cognitive load theory's working-memory architecture and its instructional designs.

5. Kahneman's fast brain was built for this: it reads structure the way it reads faces - immediately, automatically

   Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), Chapter 1 (excerpted in Scientific American)

   Kahneman's description of fast, automatic thinking, using the example of reading emotion in a face.

6. Paivio's core finding: recall and recognition are enhanced when information is presented in both visual and verbal form simultaneously; he spent his career proving this in the laboratory

   Paivio, Imagery and Verbal Processes (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971); Paivio, Mental Representations: A Dual Coding Approach (Oxford University Press, 1986) - neither read in full

   Paivio's dual coding theory: verbal and nonverbal (imagery) systems in memory, developed from the late 1960s and set out in full in 1986.

7. Sketches are cognitive tools with many uses - to promote inferences and new ideas, to organise and convey information; sketching is faster than model-building and kinder to trial-and-error and revision

   Tversky and Suwa, 'Thinking with sketches', in Markman and Wood (eds), Tools for Innovation (Oxford University Press, 2009)

   A 2009 book chapter on how designers use sketches as tools for thinking.

8. Tversky (1999): drawings are a kind of external representation, one of many cognitive tools invented to facilitate memory and thinking

   Tversky, 'What does drawing reveal about thinking?', in Gero and Tversky (eds), Visual and Spatial Reasoning in Design, Key Centre of Design Computing, University of Sydney (1999)

   Tversky's 1999 conference paper on what people's drawings reveal about how they think.

9. Tversky's research (1999) showed the page has its own properties that affect thought: path, proximity, place, and permanence; it allows externalising, organising and reorganising thought

   Nickerson, Corter, Tversky, Rho, Zahner and Yu, 'Cognitive tools shape thought: diagrams in design', Cognitive Processing 14 (2013)

   A 2013 study of how people use diagrams while designing systems, reporting that features of the page (path, proximity, place, permanence) shape the designs produced.

10. Visual representations appear to be a good bridging medium in multidisciplinary teams, where misunderstandings are common - and the research is consistent on this

    Nguyen and Mougenot, 'A systematic review of empirical studies on multidisciplinary design collaboration: Findings, methods, and challenges', Design Studies (2022)

    A 2022 systematic review of empirical studies on collaboration in multidisciplinary design teams.

11. Visuals can lighten cognitive load by externalising information, but can increase it if poorly aligned or redundant

    Chandler and Sweller, 'Cognitive load theory and the format of instruction', Cognition and Instruction 8(4), 293-332 (1991)

    The 1991 study behind the split-attention and redundancy effects: separated or duplicated text and diagrams raise cognitive load.