Is a Picture worth a Thousand Words?

In some cases yes and other cases no. The history of the phrase “One look is worth a thousand words” Dec. 8, 1921 was later changed to “One picture is worth a thousand words” on March 10, 1927 in Printers Ink (now known as Marketing/Communications) by its original author Fred R. Barnard. And called it “a Chinese proverb, so that people would take it more seriously”. It was immediately credited to Confucius. (www2.cs.uregina.ca/~hepting/research/web/words/history.html)

For an adult, a picture might be worth a thousand words, but to an infant or young child, it may not always be the case.

A new study had found that young children preferred and paid more attention to sounds than visual information, this is the first to show that this auditory preference extends to pre-schoolers with an average age of 4 years.

“Adults generally prefer visual information if they have the choice. But if you want to get the attention of young children, sounds are generally more effective than pictures if the sounds and picture have equal interest,” said Vladimir Sloutsky, professor in the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State University.

Slousky said young children probably are more attuned to sounds than visuals because this auditory preference helps them acquire language.

Researchers conducted several related studies with children and adults. In one study, 15 preschool children and 20 adults viewed a photo image and heard a sound simultaneously on a computer. During the test, the participants saw the correct picture and the correct sound with a new picture.

In children, the majority consistently chose the correct sound as the right choice over multiple tests(53% chose the correct sound, 15% chose the correct visual, and 23% gave mixed responses). However, for the adults, 100% chose the correct visual as the correct choice.

Sloutsky said the adults made the strategic choice that the right visual was most important. The children in the study gave no indication that the choice of the correct sound over the correct visual was difficult for them.

The first experiment raised several interesting questions, he said. For one, maybe young children are unable to process visual stimuli such as the pictures in the first experiment. So they repeated the experiment but with no sounds at all. The children simply had to choose the correct image. In this experiment, the children had no problem choosing the correct picture.

“This suggests processing visual information is not difficult for children, but they prefer auditory stimuli”, he said. (http//reseachnews.osu.edu/archive/auditory.htm)

In the adult world the answer is yes. We prefer pictures over sound or text. In my own experience, we communicate with pictures and symbols. We see symbols and pictures on traffic signs, such as deer figures to let us know of deer crossings. We also see symbols on instrument panels of cars, heavy equipment, aircraft cockpits, etc., to communicate to us what the switches, knobs, or buttons control. Our minds process pictures and symbols faster than text messages and are the reason we prefer pictures over any other sort of communication.