Diagnostic Visual Information in the Use of Microscopes in Histology

The science of histology depends on the skilled use of microscopes. Visual cognition in the use of microscopes is sometimes a matter of immediate recognition and very often a matter of extensive exploration and hypothesis testing. In every case, there are fundamental questions about how visual information is used to drive cognition. In an experiment that varied the visual information available to students of histology, nearly any sample of tissue provided access to the part-whole hierarchy and taxonomies learned in the science. How specific the recognition was, depended on the uniqueness of the morphology. The precise manner in which information accumulated for complete recognition of a tissue varied from tissue to tissue.