In the age of artificial intelligence, is it still appropriate to focus on human intelligence? According to Angela Locoro, Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the Department of Economics at the University of Brescia, many mysteries still surround the mechanisms underlying our cognitive processes, learning, attention, and how we interpret information to make everyday decisions. Visual data, namely the myriad of graphs and infographics that inundate the media and support responsible, clear, aesthetically pleasing communication, as well as being more immediately accessible than text, should be read and interpreted with the same competence and awareness as a written text. However, there is no school program that explicitly outlines a path for visual information literacy, nor is there a standard test that verifies this type of knowledge and the level each individual has reached in this skill.

For this reason, together with Sara Beschi, a research fellow on the project, Silvia Golia, a researcher in the same department, Luca Mari, a full professor of measurement science at LIUC University, and the partner from Tor Vergata University in Rome, Davide Falessi, a project proposal on the PRIN funds was presented and approved, on the theme of characterizing and measuring "Visual Information Literacy", with Angela Locoro as the Principal Investigator.

The idea is to characterize human evolutionary learning of visual information through a model and to validate this model through tests and questions posed to people, so as to explain and determine their level of literacy with graphs. The project has the ambitious goal of outlining the foundations of a measurement scale for visual information literacy. During the project, questions about graphs will also be posed to a generative artificial intelligence, to study how the cognitive mechanisms of man and machine can be compared and can reveal similarities and differences. The behavioral patterns of both could indicate possible future scenarios of collaboration and better sharing of intelligences, whatever their nature.