Jose Damaso Dela Cruz Pascua
FA 10 Visual Perception
Professor Mitzi Marie Aguilar-Reyes
August 21, 2025
Research Assignment 1
1. What is visual perception?
The ophthalmological description of perception involves imagining a grade
school diagram of an object, received as an image inverted inside the anatomical view
of an eye, followed lastly by the brain. The process of perception described in our
primary education is not wrong. However, it is erroneous to imagine seeing as a
phenomenon akin to a camera wherein light funnels point-by-point passively. Visual
perception begins with the retina capturing light, transmitting signals to the visual
cortex of the brain, which recognizes elements of the scene, such as surfaces, contours,
foregrounds, backgrounds, movement, colors, and their position in space1 In
Principles of Neural Science, Kandel and colleagues explain that, in contrast to a
camera, the brain actively distinguishes elements in signals and their relations to
objects of the whole.2 Bridging neural science with design, Rudolf Arnheim builds on
the principles of Gestalt psychology, as mentioned by Kandel and colleagues.
Arnheim, with an analogy of the human face, argued that our minds instinctively put
into holistic contexts individual elements - the face is a part of the human body, the
eyes of the human face, and the eyes within the larger collection of the visual sensory
system.3 Visual perception, therefore, is the organization of visual stimuli into
coherent and meaningful patterns.
2. What is creativity?
Betty Edwards in the glossary of The New Drawing on the Right Side of the
Brain described creativity as the ability to find new solutions to a problem or new
modes of expression or the bringing into existence of something new to the
individual or to culture.4 In reading Betty Edward’s perspective on creativity, I think
of Filipinos and associations with us that are analogous to creativity; creative people
are seen or expected to create within limitations, much like post-war Filipinos re-
engineering the jeep from war machines for commuters in a show of diskarte. Their
husay creative solutions solved transportation in a war-torn Philippines. Moreover,
by the same tsupers, their jeeps unabashedly display epic or humorous designs in a
show of mapaglaro, a critical trait to exercise spontaneity, experimentation, and
reduce fear of failure. Even against existential threat by modernization, local
innovators resiliently evolve the jeepney into modernity, katatagan through it all.
3. What is critical thinking?
Critical thinking in Bloom’s taxonomy is the capacity to process information,
evaluate evidence, and create insights and solutions by synthesizing procured
information.5 Critical thinking is also widely associated with the left side of the
brain, with Betty Edwards attributing the left hemisphere to language, sequential
thinking, and analytical thinking.6
4. What is visualization?
In the context of design and problem-solving, visualization is the capacity to
simulate a mental picture, explore it from different angles, and develop a structured
framework of thought to guide decisions. Visualization as an analysis in the creative
process coincides with Betty Edwards' Seeing the Problem as a Gestalt, wherein
Edwards advised the reader to play with the problem by equipping oneself with
awareness of the current configuration of the situation, research, strategies, and
approaches with both the analytical and creative hemispheres of the mind.7
5. What are the different stages of creativity?
There are five successive stages of creativity, with varying lengths and
cycles depending on the artist, outlined in Edwards’ Drawing on the Artist Within.8
The process begins with First Insight, which may be triggered by identifying a
problem or question, and results in the rough, initial glimpses of an idea. For
example, a man struggling with the lack of organization in his small apartment when
putting away his shoes imagines a vertical shoe rack. The initial insight is followed
by Saturation, the stage of gathering as many details as possible to supplement the
idea, such as the conditions of a vertical shoe rack, its dimensions, additional
features, and the minimum number of shoes it should hold. Opening cabinet doors
would consume too much limited space. Incubation follows, when the mind begins
to play around with possible solutions, and then Illumination, the eureka moment
when a breakthrough occurs—for instance, the man envisions sliding doors for his
cabinet–shoe rack hybrid. Finally, Verification confirms whether the idea is a
feasible course of action, as when the man tests his sliding door panels in a
rudimentary prototype of his cabinet.
6. What is visual communication?
Visual communication is the arrangement of visual forms to convey meaning,
functioning like a language that viewers can interpret or react to.9 Artists make use
of symbols such as line, shape, form, space, texture, value, and color in a
composition to which a viewer draws associations (e.g. thick lines representational
of confinement, a shape of two lobes on top coming together in a point at the bottom
representative of the human heart, or red meaning halt) and what these symbols may
mean in the context of the whole work.
7. What is the importance of visual perception to visual communication
Visual perception involves making sense of what is being visually
communicated. The viewer perceives an arrangement of stimuli, and the mind
identifies patterns to which the perceived symbols might allude.10 The self, being
the ultimate frame of reference, may perceive symbols personalized to the viewer,
wherein an ominous, lone silhouette of a person in the dark does not necessarily
invoke a default response of uneasiness but that of loneliness. Moreover, perhaps
the personalized self may be suspended in favor of perceiving what a stand-in sees,
such as the painting "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog" by Caspar David Friedrich.
Notes
1
Eric R. Kandel, James H. Schwartz, Thomas M. Jessell, Steven A. Siegelbaum, and
A. J. Hudspeth, Principles of Neural Science, 5th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill,
2013), 576,
https://archive.org/details/PrinciplesOfNeuralScienceFifthKANDEL/mode/2up.
2
Kandel et al., Principles of Neural Science, 556
3
Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 44, https://archive.org/details/art-
and-visual-perception-rudolf-arnheim/mode/2up.
4
Betty Edwards, The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (New York:
Tarcher/Putnam, 1999), 275, https://archive.org/download/pdfy-
5dQt81v7NYVZl2La/The%20New%20Drawing%20on%20the%20Right%20Side%2
0of%20the%20Brain.pdf.
5
Leslie Owen Wilson, “Anderson and Krathwohl: Bloom’s Taxonomy Revised—
Understanding the New Version of Bloom’s Taxonomy” (2016),
https://www.quincycollege.edu/wp-content/uploads/Anderson-and-
Krathwohl_Revised-Blooms-Taxonomy.pdf.
6
Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Artist Within (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1986),
10.
7
Edwards, Drawing on the Artist Within, 220.
8
Edwards, Drawing on the Artist Within, 4.
9
Jack Frederick Myers, The Language of Visual Art: Perception as a Basis for
Design (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989), 4.
10
Myers, The Language of Visual Art, 68.
Bibliography
Arnheim, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. https://archive.org/details/art-and-
visual-perception-rudolf-arnheim/mode/2up
Edwards, Betty. Drawing on the Artist Within. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1986.
———. The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. New York:
Tarcher/Putnam, 1999. https://archive.org/download/pdfy-
5dQt81v7NYVZl2La/The%20New%20Drawing%20on%20the%20Right%20Side%2
0of%20the%20Brain.pdf
Kandel, Eric R., James H. Schwartz, Thomas M. Jessell, Steven A. Siegelbaum, and
A. J. Hudspeth. Principles of Neural Science. 5th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013.
https://archive.org/details/PrinciplesOfNeuralScienceFifthKANDEL/mode/2up
Myers, Jack Frederick. The Language of Visual Art: Perception as a Basis for Design.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989.
Wilson, Leslie Owen. “Anderson and Krathwohl: Bloom’s Taxonomy Revised—
Understanding the New Version of Bloom’s Taxonomy.” 2016.
https://www.quincycollege.edu/wp-content/uploads/Anderson-and-
Krathwohl_Revised-Blooms-Taxonomy.pdf
