“Something is happening. We are becoming a visually mediated society. For many, understanding of the world is being accomplished, not through words, but by reading images.” — Paul Martin Lester, “Syntactic Theory of Visual Communication”
While marketing researchers have recently been discussing the power of visual cues in regard to social media, this isn’t new. If anything, it corroborates what psychologist Jerome Bruner of New York University found in studies: People recall 10 percent of what they hear, 20 percent of what they read, and 80 percent of what they see. To add even more weight to this: Educational researchers suggested in 2001 that 83 percent of human learning is visual in nature.1 Additionally, researchers at the Wharton School of Business found the combination of visual and verbal communication was most effective; 67 percent of people in an audience confirmed this when attending a conference of presentations.