What you see is what you get—but do you get what you see?

Visualization can be very powerful. But can we over-visualize? This paper describes three experiments that show that visualization without proper grounding in the underlying knowledge base could be detrimental to understanding. Although we concentrate on graphs, the conclusions should hold for diagrams and icons as well. Visualization needs to be seen as but one aspect of what is needed to understand a concept. The visual aspect of a concept can be extremely helpful and enlightening -but without thorough connections to its non-visual aspects, such as verbally expressed causat mechanisms, it can be but so many lines on paper..