We organized a symposium: Vision and Visualization- Inspiring Novel Research Directions in Vision Science

We’ve posted slides from the 4 presenters, as well as the original description from our submission below…

Talk Slides

Information visualization and the study of visual perception
(Ron Rensink)

Where do people look on data visualizations?
(Aude Oliva & Zoya Bylinskii)

Segmentation, structure, and shape perception in data visualizations
(Steven Franconeri)

Color Perception in Data Visualizations
(Danielle Szafir)

Symposium Description

Data is ubiquitous in the modern world, and its communication, analysis, and interpretation are critical scientific issues. Visualizations leverage the capabilities of the visual system, allowing us to intuitively explore and generate novel understandings of data in ways that fully-automated approaches cannot. Visualization research builds an empirical framework around design guidelines, perceptual evaluation of design techniques, and a basic understanding of the visual processes associated with viewing data displays. Vision science offers the methodologies and phenomena that can provide foundational insight into these questions. Challenges in visualization map directly to many vision science topics, such as finding data of interest (visual search), estimating data means and variance (ensemble coding), and determining optimal display properties (crowding, salience, color perception). Given the growing interest in psychological work that advances basic knowledge and allows for immediate translation, visualization provides an exciting new context for vision scientists to confirm existing hypotheses and explore new questions. This symposium will illustrate how interdisciplinary work across vision science and visualization simultaneously improves visualization techniques while advancing our understanding of the visual system, and inspire new research opportunities at the intersection of these two fields.

Historically, the crossover between visualization and vision science relied heavily on canonical findings, but this has changed significantly in recent years. Visualization work has recently incorporated and iterated on newer vision research, and the results has been met with great excitement from both sides (e.g., Rensink & Baldridge, 2010; Haroz & Whitney, 2012; Harrison et al., 2014; Borkin et al., 2016; Szafir et al., 2016). Unfortunately, very little of this work is presented regularly at VSS, and there is currently no dedicated venue for collaborative exchanges between the two research communities. This symposium showcases the current state of vision science and visualization research integration, and aspires to make VSS a home for future exchanges. Visualization would benefit from sampling a wider set of vision topics and methods, while vision scientists would gain a new real-world context that simultaneously provokes insight about the visual system and holds translational impact.