You know the cliche. "A picture is worth a thousand words." There"s a reason it's a cliche. Because there is a truth there.

Of course, when you're trying to justify budget expenditure for some visualization work, offering a cliche may just not cut it. Recently, I ran across a great article that offered some more scholarly evidence for the ability of visuals to speed comprehension of a concept. Here are the two theories that the article cited:

The Paivio Dual coding theory

"Picture stimuli have an advantage over word stimuli because they are dually encoded; they generate a verbal and image code, whereas word stimuli only generate a verbal code." (Allan Paivio, 1971, 1986)

The Nelson Semantic theory

"Pictures are perceptually more distinct from one another than are words, thus increasing their chance for retrieval." (Nelson D.L., 1976)

Add these theories to the study I highlighted in an earlier post and you have some real currency to help you justify the investment to add visualizations to your executions.