Reading and Discussion 8: Week 8 – Perception

Initial Posting Due: Tue, Oct 24 at (Canvas Link)

Readings

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. 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.

I also want you to look at the Healy and Enns paper / resources. It is sufficient to look at the web survey (since it has the cool demos).

1. Visual Queries (Chapter 1 of Visual Thinking for Design) (Ware-1-VisualQueries.pdf 2.5 mb)
2. What We Can Easily See (Chapter 2 of Visual Thinking for Design) (Ware-2-EasilySee.pdf 2.1 mb)
3. Structuring Two Dimensional Space (Chapter 3 of Visual Thinking for Design) (Ware-3-StructuringSpace.pdf 2.6 mb)
4. The Eye and Visual Brain (Chapter 5 of The Functional Art) (theFunctionalArtCh5.pdf 5.4 mb) Optional – but I listed it here to keep it in order
5. Visualizing for the Mind (Chapter 6 of The Functional Art) (theFunctionalArtCh6.pdf 8.1 mb)
6. 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)

   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

Perceptual science is a whole field, so we’re just touching the surface. Even just the beginnings of what is relevant to visualization.

• 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.

• 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.

• Crowdsourcing Graphical Perception: Using Mechanical Turk to Assess Visualization Design. Jeffrey Heer, Michael Bostock ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 203–212, 2010 PDF (607.4 KB) | Best Paper Nominee

  I mentioned this paper before as a modern version of Cleveland and McGill. It’s interesting to look at these things and think of how the perceptual system causes the effects that we see. Could you predict the results of these experiments based on perception facts?
  It’s also interesting to contrast the experiments we do in visualization to those done by perceptual psychologists (who have different goals).

Online Discussion

Initial Posting Due: Tue, Oct 24 at (Canvas Link)

This week, the readings should (hopefully) give you a crash course in how visual perception works. Rather than just quizzing you to make sure you’ve read and learned about all the visual phenomena, I want to provoke you to think about and discuss how these facts about perception might influence what we do as designers.

For your two required postings:

1. Give some examples of where the way the visual system works gives rise to efficiencies (or inefficiencies) in what we can see easily and describe how this might influence your choices in designing a visualization.

2. Give some specific examples from visualizations where a visual perception concept is utilized (or was failed to be considered, leading to a less desirable result)

There should be enough things here to lead to some conversation.