ABSTRACT
PAUL Messaris’s disquisition on the cognitive consequences of visual literacy and on television’s place in the classroom manages to be simultaneously engaging and negative. Put most baldly, he asks and answers seven questions:
Does experience with images (or television) influence viewers’ conceptual categories? No.
Does it influence their analytic reasoning? No.
Does it influence their spatial intelligence? No.
Does it influence their abstractive or analogical thinking? Maybe.
Is promoting students’ mental skills a good reason to put television in classrooms? No.
Is improving their instruction in traditional subject matter areas a good reason? No.
Is teaching them critical-viewing skills a good reason? No.
Most of the essay is devoted to the explication and argumentation that lead to Messaris’s answers to the first four questions. Taken together, conceptual categories, analytic reasoning, spatial intelligence, and abstractive or analogical thinking constitute the mental skills referred to in the fifth question. This and the last two questions begin and end the chapter and provide something of a motivational justification for exploring the first four.