Visual Thinking

In McKim's "Images in Actions" chapter, he goes in-depth to describe the various methods to solve visual puzzles. These include pattern seeking, pattern categorization, rotation, inverse drawing and so on and so forth. After a couple of decades of research, Psychologist L.L. Thurston discovered over eight traits that contribute to visual thinking versus one. These contribute to our understanding of sorting visual data. The test materials that McKim includes within the chapter are to explore "the mental operations that do the active work of visual thinking." (McKim 14).

Below are two visual tests that my roommate and I took via Puzzles.com:

The visual challenge above forces the participant to match the two colored circle-groups that are equal in area. The 'from another viewpoint' visual operation is necessary to determine how much of the circle is, or isn't there and furthermore, establish the circle's area. The correct answer was green and blue; my roommate was clever enough to determine the circle's space by labeling them as 1/2 or 3/4. If a circle had two overlapping circles cutting into it, such as in the blue, it would be equal to two other circles in the green that had one overlapping each. The viewer is forced to morph the shapes and determine the space of each circle by skewing his viewpoint. 

This visual puzzle is a completely different challenge compared to the last exercise. The participant had to follow the lines within and around the shape with the least strokes as possible. So, without lifting his pencil from the page, my roommate counted his strokes as he drew the above shape. A combination of orthographic imagination and inverse drawing is necessary because the viewer must understand all of the different lines and shapes within and around the circle in order to manipulate many different ways to draw it quickly. Orthographic imagination includes cross-cutting through a shape and manipulating the viewpoints of an object to understand it's appearance from several different views. Although the image is not a solid object, it still must be dissected and understood wholly to understand the lines that make up the image. My test-subject roommate observed the object for a good three minutes before he took his pencil to the page a drew his attempt. This is because he was mentally following different lines and  counting the strokes, to understand where to begin to the loop toward completion.