We hosted a workshop with poster presentations, short paper talks, and invited speakers Jeremy Wolfe (Harvard), Timothy Brady (UCSD), and Darko Odic (UBC):
Novel Directions in Vision Science and Visualization Research
Sponsored by: Adobe Inc., CU Boulder VisuaLab, Northwestern U Visual Thinking Lab
Following the last three years of fun interdisciplinary events at both VIS and VSS, we are holding the first official event for vision scientist and visualization researcher collaboration, interaction, and peer reviewed research-sharing at VIS. The specific goal of this workshop is to provide a forum where vision science and visualization researchers can share cutting-edge research at this interdisciplinary intersection, in preparation for publishing and presenting it at both IEEE VIS, as well as in the upcoming Journal of Vision Special Issue.
Short Papers:
Note: paper drafts can be downloaded via IEEE Xplore and here with the workshop password.
Invited Speaker Abstracts and Slides:
Visual search– Jeremy Wolfe
If you want people to find “it”, what should “it” look like?
Decades of research on visual search have given us quite a good understanding of how people look for targets in scenes containing distracting items. Knowing how people search is not the same as knowing how to design searchable visual stimuli, especially if we want users to be able to search those stimuli for a variety of different targets. Still, the topics of search and searchability must be related so we will explore what the rules governing the deployment of visual attention might suggest to the creators of new visualizations.
Working memory– Timothy Brady
When processing complex visual displays, people often need to hold information actively in mind to facilitate comparison or integration. Decades of research have shown that our ability to hold information actively in mind is incredibly limited (e.g., we can miss large changes to scenes if we happen to not be holding in mind the right information), and simple rules like people can remember 3-4 things are popular ways to conceive of these limits. In this talk, I discuss what aspects of visual information people can easily hold in mind; what things are extremely difficult to hold in mind; and how these limits relate to visualization design.
Visual magnitudes– Darko Odic
How perception perceives number, time, and space.
The perception of visual magnitudes – length, area, time, number, etc. – has been one of the foundational questions since the dawn of empirical psychology, stretching back from Weber and Helmholtz to today. In this talk, I will share a number of insights, new and old, about how we perceive number, time, and space representations throughout our entire lifespan, focusing especially on issues that might be relevant for data visualization. I will first discuss findings about how our perceptual system deals with competing magnitude dimensions: situations in which, e.g., both number and length are competing for attention. Next, I will share several findings demonstrating that surface area perception is susceptible to various surprising inconsistencies and illusions, whereby we perceive collections of objects to be cumulatively smaller than they really are. Finally, I will share findings on how perceptual magnitude representations allow us to easily find the maximal and minimal element in a set.
Thanks to everyone who attended this event!
InfoVis x Vision science 