Abstract
Symbols are used in scatterplots to encode data in a way that is appropriate for perception through human visual channels. Symbol size is believed to be the second
dominant channel after color. We study symbol size perception in scatterplots in the context of analytic tasks requiring size discrimination. More specifically, we
performed an experiment to measure human performance in three visual analytic tasks. Circles are used as the representative symbol, with eight, linearly varying radii; 24
persons, divided across three groups, participated; and both objective and subjective measures were obtained. We propose a model to describe the results. The perception of
size is assumed to be an early step in the complex cognitive process to mediate discrimination, and psychophysical laws are used to describe this perceptual mapping. Different mapping schemes are compared by regression on the experimental data. The results show that approximate homogeneity of size perception exists in our complex tasks
and can be closely described by a power law transformation with an exponent of 0.4. This yields an optimal scale for symbol size discrimination.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 28th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2010), Atlanta GA, USA, April 10-15, 2010 |
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery, Inc |
| Pages | 2553-2562 |
| Publication status | Published - 2010 |
| Event | 28th Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Florence, Italy Duration: 5 Apr 2008 → 10 Apr 2008 Conference number: 28 http://www.chi2010.org/ |
Conference
| Conference | 28th Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems |
|---|---|
| Abbreviated title | CHI 2010 |
| Country/Territory | Italy |
| City | Florence |
| Period | 5/04/08 → 10/04/08 |
| Internet address |