The Week in Vis 09 (Mon, Oct 28 – Fri, Nov 1): Perception

by Mike Gleicher on October 26, 2019

Week in Vis 9 Mon, Oct 28-Fri, Nov 1

Last week, we thought about interaction and implementation. I was doing this in Vancouver at the VIS conference. I was also seeing lots of other visualization work, which will probably work its way into class.

This week, we’ll talk about the other “how” of visualization: how people see, and what this means for visualization. A day of lecture and a few readings are not going to turn us into Perceptual Scientists or Psychologists (unless you already are) – so we’ll just be getting a little taste of how the human visual system works (or at least the current theories), and try to think about what this means for us as visualization designers. There’s a bit more reading this week than the past few weeks, but most people find it interesting.

There is a chance I might swap the ICE and lecture (to give me more time to get the new things I learned about perception into the lecture), so the ICE may be on Monday not Wednesday. Don’t be surprised if you show up Monday and we do an ICE rather than a lecture.

Design Challenge 2 has its next phase – a “rough draft” that shows us that you really are working on it, and not saving the assignment to the last minute. I think I called it “signs of life” in the assignment description.

Readings for the Week

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. And look at Chris Healy’s web page to get a sense of pre-attentive effects.

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 2.5mb)
  2. What We Can Easily See (Chapter 2 of Visual Thinking for Design) (Ware-2-EasilySee.pdf 2.1mb)
  3. Structuring Two Dimensional Space (Chapter 3 of Visual Thinking for Design) (Ware-3-StructuringSpace.pdf 2.6mb)
  4. Visualizing for the Mind (Chapter 6 of The Functional Art) (theFunctionalArtCh6.pdf 8.1mb)
  5. 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.

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…

  • 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.
  • 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.

  • 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.

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