CRII: CHS: Understanding cognitive potentials of interactive visualizations

可视化越来越多地用于支持数据的分析和理解；然而，关于可视化如何影响人们对基础数据的心理模型以及由此对分析任务绩效的影响，人们知之甚少。为此，该项目将进行一些实验，以解决将可视化设计与认知联系起来的两个关键问题。第一个问题涉及可视化相同数据的不同技术如何影响人们执行常见分析任务的能力，以及设计如何影响他们对数据不同方面的视觉感知和注意力。第二个重点是人们在使用不同的可视化设计探索数据集时形成的关于数据集的概念模型的类型，以及设计的可视和交互元素如何影响这些模型。更好地理解人们是如何对可视化进行推理的，这将促进认知心理学和可视化设计。学习信息可视化的学生将参与研究，直接受益于他们的设计能力，并在可视化日益普遍的领域获得潜在好处，包括新闻、教育、商业和医学。为了解决给定设计的视觉和空间元素如何影响注意力和任务绩效的问题，项目团队将首先基于分散在各种学术学科的现有研究，创建常见可视化的视觉空间属性的分类，将可视化特征映射到它们支持各种分析任务的能力，如比较、解释、排名和分类。他们将通过一系列实验来验证和扩展分类，这些实验考察了所花费的时间、错误率、眼睛凝视数据和参与者的定性反馈，以三角方式得出结论，即不同的设计如何支持对数据的观察和推断，以及哪些类型的可视化为哪些类型的任务提供了观察优势。项目团队将设计一系列分析任务，强调源自布鲁姆分类和不同类型知识(事实、概念和程序)的不同认知过程，以便进行实验，以获得人们在使用不同可视化设计时形成的各种心理模型。这些实验的参与者将被给予时间来探索可视化，然后在项目团队收集眼睛凝视数据的同时使用有声思考协议执行任务。然后，参与者将被要求通过一系列访谈反思他们的分析活动，并绘制一系列数据的表示法，以捕捉可能构成心理模型的不同类型的关系。一项后续研究将考察提供多个可视化和显示可视化的控制级别的效果，以解决与相同数据的多个可视化交互如何影响人们形成的心理模型。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Visualizations are increasingly used to support analysis and understanding of data; however, little is known about just how visualizations affect people's mental models of the underlying data and their resulting influence on analysis task performance. To that end, this project will conduct a number of experiments to address two key questions that link visualization design to cognition. The first question addresses how different techniques for visualizing the same data affect people's ability to carry out common analysis tasks, as well as how the designs affect their visual perception of and attention to different aspects of the data. The second focuses on the kinds of conceptual models people form about a dataset when they explore it using different visualization designs, and how visual and interactive elements of the designs affect those models. Developing better understandings of how people reason with visualizations will advance both cognitive psychology and visualization design. Students studying information visualization will be involved in the research, directly benefiting their design abilities and having potential benefits in domains where visualizations are becoming increasingly common, including journalism, education, business, and medicine. To address questions of how visual and spatial elements of a given design affect attention and task performance, the project team will first create a taxonomy of the visuo-spatial properties of common visualizations based on existing research scattered across a variety of academic disciplines, mapping visualization features to their ability to support various analysis tasks such as comparison, interpretation, ranking, and categorization. They will validate and extend the taxonomy through a series of experiments that look at time spent, error rates, eye gaze data, and qualitative participant feedback to triangulate conclusions about how different designs support observations and inferences over the data and which kinds of visualizations provide observational advantages for which kinds of tasks. The project team will design a series of analysis tasks that emphasize different cognitive processes derived from both Bloom's taxonomy and different types of knowledge (factual, conceptual, and procedural) in order to conduct experiments that get at the kinds of mental models people form when using different visualization designs. Participants in these experiments will be given time to explore the visualizations, then perform the tasks using a think-aloud protocol while the project team collects eye gaze data. Participants will then be asked to reflect on their analysis activities through a series of interviews, and draw a series of representations of the data that capture different sorts of relationships that might compose a mental model. A followup study will look at the effect of providing multiple visualizations and levels of control of which visualizations are shown, to address how interacting with multiple visualizations of the same data affects the mental models that people form.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.