Readings 9: Perception
Human vision is complex and fascinating (to me). Understanding it is beyond the scope of the class, but hopefully, you can learn some basics and see how it connects to visualization design. It’s so hard to pick just a small set of readings. I admit that this list starts to get long.
The most important “reading” is to watch a Steve Franconeri talk. He gave a virtual lecture on campus earlier this year, but the content is basically from the talk that he gave at the Open Vis Conference in 2018. This video is required.
The main readings are the Ware chapters, since it’s a good introduction to the basics of perception, and its impact on design. Chapter 6 of Cairo is useful because it considers “higher level” perceptual issues, and gives his non-scientific take. I also include Cairo Chapter 5 (as optional) because it’s redundant with Ware, but it’s fun to see his (less scientific) take on it. And look at Chris Healy’s web page to get a sense of pre-attentive effects.
The readings aren’t as plentiful as they might seem: the Ware and Cairo chapters are fairly light, and get the key points across (you don’t need as much of the details). You don’t need to read the Healy and Enns paper - just look at the demos. The 39 studies in 30 minutes posting is totally skimmable - it’s a 30 minute talk, but you can get the key ideas quickly.
The Ware readings are from the book Visual Thinking for Design - this is the older version. If you have the newer version of the book, read the appropriate chapters. You were already required to read Chapter 10 (the last chapter) in a prior week. If you haven’t read it yet include it in your readings. (ware10.pdf 3.2mb)
(required) Steve Franconeri. Thinking with Data Visualizations, Fast and Slow, Open Vis Conference Talk, 2018 (via YouTube).
(required) Visual Queries (Chapter 1 of Visual Thinking for Design) (ware01.pdf 3.1mb)
(required) What We Can Easily See (Chapter 2 of Visual Thinking for Design) (ware02.pdf 3.4mb)
(optional) Structuring Two Dimensional Space (Chapter 3 of Visual Thinking for Design) (ware03.pdf 4.6mb)
(required) Visualizing for the Mind (Chapter 6 of The Functional Art) (theFunctionalArtCh6.pdf 8.1mb)
(skim) Look at the pre-attention demos and pictures in the old version of Chris Healey’s web survey of perceptual principles for vis. The paper (optional, below) is much better in terms of explaining things - but it’s too much to require as reading.
Semi-Optional
This is such an important topic that I tend to give too much reading about it. These are things that would be required, except that I don’t want the list to be too long.
(optional) 39 Studies about human perception in 30 minutes. By Kennedy Elliot. Medium Posting.
The list is getting long, but this is really worth a skim.
This gives you the punch line of 39 different perception studies very quickly. What’s great about this is that it gets at “what can we learn from design from each of this.” While understanding the experiments is interesting (especially if you are a researcher trying to design new experiments), the basic takeaway is often what you need to influence design.
(optional) A Survey of Perception-Based Visualization Studies by Task by Ghulam Quadri and Paul Rosen. (Arxiv) (Official Paper)
This is an excellent survey of the literature of perception research with Visualization. It is organized by what the findings are useful for. It gets a bit long, but if you skim it, it can give you a good survey of what the visualization community has looked at in terms of perceptual studies.
Perception: Optional
Perceptual science is a whole field, so we’re just touching the surface. Even just the beginnings of what is relevant to visualization. It’s hard for me not to require these…
(optional) The Eye and Visual Brain (Chapter 5 of The Functional Art) (theFunctionalArtCh5.pdf 5.4mb) Optional - Cairo’s take on it. More based on his experience as a designer.
(optional) Healey, C. G., & Enns, J. T. (2012). Attention and Visual Memory in Visualization and Computer Graphics. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 18(7), 1170–1188. (pdf) (doi)
This is a good survey of basic perception stuff that is useful for vis. In this past, this was required reading. Warning: this survey is a little dense, but it gets the concepts across with examples. Don’t worry about the theory so much. Get a sense of what the visual system does (through the figures, and the descriptions of the phenomena), and skip over the theories of how it does it (unless you’re interested). There is an older, online version as Chris Healy’s web survey which has lots of cool pre-attention demos. But the text in the paper is much better, and the paper includes more things.
(optional) Franconeri, S. L. (2013). The Nature and Status of Visual Resources. In D. Reisberg (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Psychology (pp. 1–16). Oxford University Press. (pdf) (doi)
This is a survey, similar to Healey and Enns above, but written more from the psychology side. The first part, where he characterizes the various kinds of limitations on our visual system is something I’ve found really valuable. The latter parts, where he discusses some of the current theories for why these limitations happen is interesting (to me), but less directly relevant to visualization (since it is mainly trying to explain limits that we need to work around). I think these explanations may lead to new ideas for visualization – but its less direct of a path.
(optional) Albers, D., Correll, M., Gleicher, M., & Franconeri, S. (2014). Ensemble Processing of Color and Shape: Beyond Mean Judgments. Journal of Vision, 14(10), 1056–1056. (paper page) (doi)
We (Steve, myself, and some of our students) have written a survey paper on some other things the visual system can do (and why it can matter for vis). We call it “visual aggregation” and in psychology they call it “ensemble encoding.” It might be useful to skim through for the pictures and diagrams. I will talk about this stuff (at least the work that we did) in class.