Exploring Cognitive Strategies for Integrating Multiple-View Visualizations

Abstract

Visualizing information is useful for finding patterns in complex data sets, but little research has been done on how people understand multiple-view visualizations (multiple visualizations presented simultaneously). A controlled experiment was performed using different combinations of visualizations and different task types as independent variables, and qualitative and quantitative data were collected. To collect the data psychological tests, logs of the participants' interaction, eye-tracking equipment, and video recordings were used. This paper reports a portion of the results from this experiment. Main findings include that, contrary to what was suggested in previous literature, the time cost for switching between different types of visualizations (context switching) may not be significant, and that displaying the data using the same type of visualization may cause interference. Orthogonal combinations appear to aid users in finding and recognizing patterns, and focusing attention and analogical reasoning on spatial relationships may be important cognitive abilities for the given tasks.