Images are central to our understanding of and learning about our world. We argue that visual training needs to be improved in the higher education system to enhance the potential of visual thinking to mediate productively our relationship with the context we inhabit. Initiatives from the social sciences and humanities since the end of the twenty…

A conceptualization of visual proficiency is offered. A survey is described which asked college students (N = 358) to identify five photographs, five symbols, and five paintings that are generally recognized to be "famous". About 27% of all respondents claimed to recognize all the photographs, 23% recognized all the symbols, and 3%…

Despite the fact that to date Visual Literacy (VL) scholars have not arrived at a general consensus for a theoretical organization of the VL field, important conceptual investigations have emerged over the past four decades. In this paper we discuss and synthesize those studies. We then present a first attempt toward a cohesive theory of VL. The…