An account of image perceptual understanding based on epistemic attention and reference

Technological and scientific images, and other images with epistemic uses, have varied appearances and functions. They seem to be analog or symbolic representations available to researchers for a variety of epistemic purposes such as summarizing data, or presenting, discussing and verifying hypothetic propositions about the world. This article studies the perception and understanding of scientific/epistemic images within a conceptual framework grounded in the notion of reference. It introduces the hypothesis stating that the performance of the perceptual understanding of a particular scientific image depends on the epistemic uses of attention. The hypothesis suggests that understanding a scientific picture requires making an epistemic use of the attentional control of visual routines in order to obtain knowledge on the spatial structure and the referents of a particular image or graphic representation.