Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Communication through Images
Smell
In a similar way as some musicians (and not only
musicians) posses perfect pitch, some painters (and
not only painters) have perfect color feel and color
memory: they have an ability to recognize and
remember color without an external reference for
making a comparison, so many of them do not need
to bring a color sample to a store in order to choose
the right color of a paint. Visual communication that
goes with the use of signals perceived by our sense
of vision would thus involve images as well as writ-
ten texts. Communication through images may take
various forms: two-dimensional - such as drawings,
art works, graphs, graphics, or typographic prints,
among others, three-dimensional forms - such as
architectural or sculptural works, 4-dimensional
time-based media - such as moving images, and
also can become interactive - going both ways,
and virtual. Visual semiotics, a part of the domain
of semiotics supports analysis of the visual way of
communication and examines interaction between
pictures of products or events and the audience as
recipients. Images serve in such cases as iconic,
indexical, or symbolic signs, according to the works
of Peirce on formal semiotics from the 1860s. Com-
munication through images uses visual metaphors,
visualization techniques, symbols, analogies, icons,
and time-based images; also, it often links haptic
(related to the sense of touch) and visual modes
using gesture, body language, dance, mime (a per-
formance art involving body motions without the
use of speech) and pantomime (a musical theatri-
cal production using gestures and movements but
not words). Visualization techniques often include
small multiple drawings that represent the sets of
data with miniature pictures, to reveal repetition,
change, pattern, and facilitate comparisons. Since
their introduction, Chernoff (1971) cartoon faces
evolved into a tool for presenting data as empathic
facial expressions (Loizides, 2012; Loizides and
Slater, 2001, 2002). Thus a positive condition of
the visualized data should be reflected as a smiling
face and vice versa.
The sense of smell, called olfaction has che-
mosensory property as it can convert chemical
signals into stimuli for our perception. Separate
systems detect airborne substances and fluid
stimuli. For example, pheromones - chemical
substances produced by animals (mostly mam-
mals and insects) and released into the environ-
ment trigger specific social responses. Depending
on the type of a pheromone (the alarm, food trail,
or sex pheromones) the response is in the form
of aggregation of individuals, flight, aggres-
sion, but also attraction of mates or babies, and
changes their activity, behavior, or physiology.
A single receptor recognizes many odors. Odors
are translated into patterns of neural activity and
the olfactory bulb, olfactory nerve, and then the
olfactory cortex interpret the patterns. Olfactory
sensory neurons are replaced throughout life.
Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck were awarded
jointly the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
2004 “for their discoveries of odorant receptors
and the organization of the olfactory system.”
The smell cells in dogs are 100 times larger
than human cells and much more numerous:
dogs have about 1 million smell cells per nostril
and therefore they are so keen to go for a walk
to 'read' (perceive) and 'write' (mark) their
messages. Emoticons of smiley-face in a picto-
rial [☺] or digital [:)] form using punctuation
marks seem to fit the description of a dog's smell
perception because of a strong emotional com-
ponent of the dogs' sharp perception of smells.
Herz, Schankler, & Beland (2004) have shown
that the senses of smell and taste are uniquely
sentimental, prompting the feelings because
they “are the only senses that connect directly
to the hippocampus, the center of the brain's
long-term memory (while) all our other senses
(sight, touch, and hearing) are first processed
by the thalamus, the source of language and the
front door to consciousness.”
