From signal overload to shared insight: creating and structuring scientific visuals for comprehension and dialogue

Effective communication of scientific content can be challenging due to cognitive overload. This is experienced especially during conferences and poster presentations, where the presence of competing stimuli limits message retention. Scientific visuals offer a means to overcome this limitation by emphasizing the essential components of a narrative in a form that is rapidly and intuitively processed. Rather than serving primarily as demonstrations of complexity or markers of personal accomplishment, scientific visuals should function as tools for idea exchange, enabling broader comprehension and facilitating dialogue. The Gestalt principles are an important guide for the visual creation process. These perceptual principles exploit pre-attentive processing mechanisms that allow viewers to extract essential structure and meaning immediately with minimal conscious effort. Effective development of scientific visuals can be approached in three stages: an initial sketch phase, focused on defining the core content and refining the central message, followed by a design phase and refinement phase, in which form, layout and color are used according to perceptual principles. This structured process ensures that complex narratives can be communicated with clarity and precision. By prioritizing cognitive accessibility over ornamental design, visuals become a central and intrinsic component of scientific discourse, supporting insight generation, fostering dialogue, and contributing to collaborative learning and consecutive knowledge building.