Context Matters: A Theory of Semantic Discriminability for Perceptual Encoding Systems
Context Matters: A Theory of Semantic Discriminability for Perceptual Encoding Systems
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DOI：
10.1109/tvcg.2021.3114780
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发表时间：
2021-08
影响因子：
5.2
通讯作者：
Kushin Mukherjee;Brian Yin;Brianne E. Sherman;Laurent Lessard;Karen B. Schloss
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Kushin Mukherjee;Brian Yin;Brianne E. Sherman;Laurent Lessard;Karen B. Schloss
人们在颜色和概念之间的联系会影响他们在信息可视化中解释颜色含义的能力。先前的研究表明，这种影响仅限于与颜色有强烈、特定联系的概念。然而，尽管一个概念可能与任何颜色都没有强烈的关联，但它的映射可以在编码系统中的其他概念上下文中消除歧义。我们在语义可辨别性理论中阐明了这一观点，语义可辨别性理论是理解决定人们何时可以从感知特征推断意义的条件的一般框架。语义可辨别性是观察者能够推断出视觉特征和概念之间的独特映射的程度。语义可辨别性理论认为，概念集的语义可辨别性能力受到概念集中概念间特征-概念关联分布差异的限制。我们定义了这一理论的形式性质，并在两个实验中测试了它的含义。结果表明，颜色-概念关联分布之间的统计距离确实限制了概念组产生语义可区分颜色的能力（实验1）。此外，只要颜色在语义上是可区分的，人们就可以解释条形图中颜色的含义，即使是以前被认为是“不可着色”的概念（实验2）。研究结果表明，颜色在视觉交流方面比我们之前认为的更为强大。
People's associations between colors and concepts influence their ability to interpret the meanings of colors in information visualizations. Previous work has suggested such effects are limited to concepts that have strong, specific associations with colors. However, although a concept may not be strongly associated with any colors, its mapping can be disambiguated in the context of other concepts in an encoding system. We articulate this view in semantic discriminability theory, a general framework for understanding conditions determining when people can infer meaning from perceptual features. Semantic discriminability is the degree to which observers can infer a unique mapping between visual features and concepts. Semantic discriminability theory posits that the capacity for semantic discriminability for a set of concepts is constrained by the difference between the feature-concept association distributions across the concepts in the set. We define formal properties of this theory and test its implications in two experiments. The results show that the capacity to produce semantically discriminable colors for sets of concepts was indeed constrained by the statistical distance between color-concept association distributions (Experiment 1). Moreover, people could interpret meanings of colors in bar graphs insofar as the colors were semantically discriminable, even for concepts previously considered “non-colorable” (Experiment 2). The results suggest that colors are more robust for visual communication than previously thought.