I have been thinking about how photojournalists process visual information and make judgments about what they see. Although this seems like an odd thing to think about, there is research in the cognitive sciences to help us understand how human beings process information. My feeling is that the more we understand how the brain works, the better we can understand photojournalism.
Robert Slywester writes a column for Brain Connection, an online magazine for brain study. This month’s column, The Role of Snap Judgments in Intelligence: An Intriguing Perspective offers some insights into how intelligence is defined and the role it plays in the decision-making process. I am inclined to believe that photojournalists develop an acute sense of immediacy in making judgments about how they respond to situations.
Slywester sums up Jeff Hawkins’ work on human intelligence by suggesting that the core processes involved in intelligent prediction and response:
(1) how rapidly we can predict and respond to an event, and (2) the amount and type of information we need for effective prediction and response.
For Slywester, “Those who can quickly and correctly predict and respond to dangers and opportunities are more apt to live long enough to enhance the gene pool, so whatever is innate about rapid successful prediction and response has become integral to human life. We're thus capable of making rapid successful subconscious judgments, and we tend to value that ability.”
In terms of photojournalism, I think Slywester’s comments on the brains ability to separate snap from long-range decision-making process is relevant.
We have two separate response systems: (1) Challenges with a sense of immediacy tend to elicit snap judgments and responses. They are rapidly and reflexively processed within our brain's innate stress-driven, conceptual (principally subcortical) problem-solving system. This system responds quickly on the basis of the small amount of emotionally intense information that's typically available in such situations. It's thus quite vulnerable to making impetuous, racist, sexist, or elitist judgments that focus on only a few highly visible emotion-charged elements. (2) Challenges without a sense of immediacy are processed more slowly and reflectively by our brain's curiosity-driven, analytical (principally cortical) problem-solving system.
This explanation may help photojournalists and educators to work toward developing more integrated ways of seeing. At the same, photojournalism is a cultural practice with implicit and explicit conventions that are acquired and refined over time. These conventions also impinge on how visual information is processed and organized by the brain.