Data visualization is a technique used to visually represent information which gives a clear and in-depth knowledge about the data. Based on the history, data is represented in various visual objects like pie chart, bar chart, Scatter plot etc. through which we get to know the trends, patterns and helps in decision making. Human perception plays a vital role in perception and improves the quality and quantity of data.
Cleveland and McGill[i] in their paper have mentioned about the two experiments they conducted to find human perception. They used elementary perception task to find the basic element in graphics. There motive to conduct this experiment was to get guidelines used with the judgement while designing a graph. For a single graph people may have different perception for a single graph but in the elementary perceptual tasks they made people predicted the accurate answer by the theory: position judgement, scale judgement, length judgement and angle judgement.
Understanding the visual perception in other aspect Jeffrey Heer and Michael Bostock have replicated the Cleveland and McGill’s theory. With the help on new experiments they gave insight of visualization using crowdsourcing on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Depending on their experiment on crowdsourcing they concluded that it results in cost reduction, a faster time of completion.
Christopher G. Healey has worked on perception in visualization. In this paper he has done his research on preattentive processing where he has identified basic and low level human visual system to identify basic properties of visualization
Reference: [i] Cleveland, William S, and Robert McGill. “Graphical Perception: Theory, Experimentation, and Application to the Development of Graphical Methods.” Taylor & Francis, www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01621459.1984.10478080. [ii] Heer, Jeffrey, and Michael Bostock. “Crowdsourcing Graphical Perception: Using Mechanical Turk to Assess Visualization Design.” Stanford Vis Group | Crowdsourcing Graphical Perception: Using Mechanical Turk to Assess Visualization Design, vis.stanford.edu/papers/crowdsourcing-graphical-perception. [iii] Healey, Christopher G.“Perception in Visualization”.Department of Computer Science North Carolina State Univesity. https://www.csc2.ncsu.edu/faculty/healey/PP/