Chapter 12 



VISUAL COMMUNICATION 



WILLIAM S. VERPLANCKi 

 Indiana University 



Foreword 



It is not possible in this chapter to survey 

 the whole field of visual communication, 

 ranging as it does from the austere and 

 complex profundities of the mathematical 

 journals to the questioning look of a sailor 

 meeting a girl. In man's history, visual 

 communication has played no small role, 

 even if writing is excluded from considera- 

 tion. In some cultures, visual communica- 

 tion has assumed the function of spoken 

 language, whether supplementary to the 

 spoken language, as in the Italian's use of 

 gesture, or in place of it, as in the sign lan- 

 guage of the Plains Indians. We must here 

 be concerned with the application of visual 

 communication systems to the modern sub- 

 marine, and more particularly with their 

 possible usefulness as a supplement to, or a 

 substitute for, voice communication, where 

 the latter has been solely employed and 

 found not entirely satisfactory. We shall, 

 then, attempt to clarify some of the problems 

 of visual communication, to indicate some 

 areas where visual communication might 

 well be employed, and to survey in a sum- 

 mary fashion the areas of psychological re- 

 search which may be expected to yield the 

 information which is needed for the exploita- 

 tion of visual communication to its fullest. 



Introduction 



Military commands, whether submarines, 

 aircraft, or regiments, must act as units. 



' The author wishes to express his thanks to 

 those who have offered helpful comments regard- 

 ing the problems of visual communication. Par- 

 ticularly, he wishes to thank the officers and men 

 with whom he consulted at New London and Key 

 West. 



The activities of individual machines and 

 men must be coordinated so that the unit 

 can function with fullest efficiency, both in 

 the appraisal by command of the situation 

 in which it is placed, and in the execution of 

 maneuvers dictated by command's evalua- 

 tion of and response to that situation. In- 

 dividual men must be trained and individual 

 machines designed so that both fit into a 

 single organization capable of immediate and 

 precise action. The means by which such 

 integration of the behavior of single units is 

 effected has been called "coupling," after the 

 terminology applied to purely mechanical 

 systems, and may be achieved relatively 

 readily when we are dealing with machines 

 alone. When, however, the human individ- 

 ual, enters into a couple with a machine, or 

 with another individual, many and complex 

 difficulties may arise, and the behavioral 

 properties of the human must be carefully 

 considered. The greater difficulties and fre- 

 quently lessened reliability of systems in 

 which humans enter as couples have led to 

 a regular and consistent tendency to elimi- 

 nate the human from couples wherever pos- 

 sible — to move toward the push-button war. 



We are not, as yet, able to design and con- 

 struct such purely mechanical combat units; 

 there remains the very live problem of the 

 production of more eflficient, rapid, and ac- 

 curate couples involving the human. Re- 

 search has been directed to each of the 

 three types of couples; machine to man, as 

 in instrument and radar design and display; 

 man to machine, as in investigations of in- 

 strument controls, and man to man, as in 

 communication. 



The control of the behavior of one individ- 

 ual by the behavior of another individual is 



249 



