Core socialist values are the concentrated embodiment of contemporary Chinese spirit and the high generalization and highest abstraction of the essence of socialist values, but this does not mean that the cultivation of core socialist values should separate rationality and sensibility, and treat its cultivation with pure concept or metaphysical thinking. Cultivating core socialist values should consider people's subjective identity, including concrete cognition, emotional identity and rational thinking. Visual thinking takes visual image as the medium, and is the creative thinking of the intersection and integration of sensibility and rationality. It is an important way of thinking for cultivating core socialist values. It provides a continuous exploration process of the integration of sensibility and rationality for cultivating core socialist values, and there is a high degree of coincidence between the two. The exploratory nature of direct perception of visual thinking can directly understand the fact behind the abstraction of core values. It is people's direct perception and exploration of the facts related to core socialist values, reducing the thinking process of understanding abstract concepts. Visual thinking gives full play to the creativity of imagination, which can deepen the emotion of the identification of core values, enable people to continuously construct and produce visual images related to core socialist values in their minds based on existing experience and knowledge, and trigger emotional resonance and ideological perception. Visual thinking awakens the reality of "unconscious experience", which can sublimate the consciousness of practicing core values, break through the obstacles between people's original unconscious experience and consciousness, and form realistic perception and practical knowledge that can be used in the process of practice. These provide a basis for in-depth discussion of the role and mechanism of visual thinking in cultivating core socialist values, and help social members to effectively understand and deeply identify with core socialist values. The operation mechanism of visual thinking in cultivating core socialist values is embodied in observation (image selection and cognitive identity of core socialist values), imagination (image reconstruction and emotional identity of core socialist values) and construction (image sublimation and behavior identification of core socialist values). These three levels are a continuous, unified and cross integration process, which is manifested in that the selection of visual images of core socialist values provides materials for reconstruction, while reconstruction guides and filters the cognition obtained by selection; the reconstruction of visual images provides power for sublimation, and sublimation expresses reconstruction, encourages and corrects the selection and reconstruction of visual images. The three-dimensional path of giving full play to the role of visual thinking in cultivating core socialist values is also reflected in activating the visual symbols of core socialist values, realizing the generation of "image" from "word", accumulating the visual schema of core socialist values, realizing the generation of "meaning" from "image", activating the visual image of core socialist values, and realizing the generation of "action" from "meaning".