Visual Spatial Abilities or Visual Literacy
Visual and spatial thinking pervades all human everyday tasks like finding ones way through a shopping mall and back to your parked car, arranging items in drawers or on shelves, rearranging furniture, reading, and during all construction. Visual and spatial relationships include two and three-dimensional drawings and models representing objects, events, and ideas. Objects and ideas such as molecular structures, DNA, cells, magnetic fields, circulation of blood, operation of body systems, solar systems, galaxies, interactions, maps, circuits, and virtually any system and how its subsystems interact, geometry, mathematical properties of number, number patterns, mathematical operations, functions, graphing, representations of any mathematical idea, and as a tool for problem solving.
A spatial/visual representation is not created as if the mind is a video recorder storing images for future reference where perceptual snapshots can be referenced mentally in the manner one looks at old pictures in a picture album or video on a monitor. It is the building of mental representations from active manipulation of the environment in relationship to a current best fit mental representations.
Visual literacy is the ability to decode visual actions, objects, symbols, and other images and gain meaning from them and to encode thoughts and ideas and express them with visual representations.
Visual learning is the process used to become visually literate.
Geometry is the study of spatial objects, relationships, and transformations that have been formalized and the axiomatic mathematical systems that have been constructed to represent them.
Spatial reasoning is the set of cognitive processes by which mental representations for spatial objects, relationships, and transformations are constructed and manipulated.
Visualization includes written text, images, symbols, scale diagrams, cutaway diagrams, cross-sections, flow charts, organizational charts, cycle charts, webs, hierarchical diagrams, dichotomous charts, network charts, bar graphs, circle graphs, line graphs, three-dimensional graphs, time lines, bird’s eye view maps, context maps, altitude maps, tables, graphic designs.
Careers Requiring Spatial and Visual Skill
Visual Spatial Skills developed by Alan J. McCormack
Six Modes of Visual Learning developed by the Polaroid Education Program
Instructional Activities to Develop Visual Spatial Abilities
Robert Sweetland's Notes ©