Introduction

Human perception plays an important role in the area of visualization. An understanding of perception can significantly improve both the quality and the quantity of information being displayed. This essay is about to discuss the relationship between perception and visualization.

Method

Presenting solutions nowadays, showing info through presentation is very common. And right now, business intelligence has advanced so much that there are so many tools that are used to represent data, represent info through various types of visualization like different types of charts, bars. But data visualization has direct dependencies on the perception. From one side which is visualization we have to prepare for data, we have to do analysis on that, we have to structure that data in forms of different charts or graphs. And we have to also understand the interpretation and perception part and the audience of these data. We have to map and match these data to structure of perception. Also known as defining the data in different patterns and designs according to the perceptions of audience. There are multiple ways to present data to visualization and also there are so many studies which have been done on using the public samples, giving them questionnaires to get their feedbacks. The most important factor of visualization is that we need to consider various factors to create the designs. For example, when we are creating a picture, we need to consider about the positions, the color, the volume, the value. And there are multiple approaches to show this picture such as bars, pie charts, scatter plots.
Perceptions plays a very important role when we talk about visualization. If you understand your audience and understand the way how they perceive., it will give you flexibility to show info in much better way. Various factors like density, shape, color can make a contribution to the quality of visualization. Selecting the right approach is all depend on what you are trying to show and display. It depends on various elements, and one of the most important elements is human perception. People capture the info in first few seconds and then human brain will be focus on the selected info and keep them in the memory. Most part of the memory will not stay long in human brain, and there is only a small part of the memory will last long. And this part is not about any patterns, it is only about the facts and small info you perceived. So it is always good for people to understand their audience and the way audience perceive info before they decide to present info or data.

Discussion

Look at 2 pictures above, I find out something interesting. In certain circumstances, perceptions from human beings could get wrong easily. There is no doubt that when we create any visualized graphs or charts through machine, which could barely get wrong, the visualization is indeed very accurate and precise. But when we, as a human being, obtain this information through our eyes, sometimes we may be misled. Due to that situation, maybe when we create some kinds of visualized graphs, we need to avoid that kind of phenomenon.

As each coin has its two sides. The unclear perceptions from human beings can also help us to understand some complex pictures like below.

So now maybe it is a little confused about the relationship between perception and visualizaion. But I highly believe situations mentioned above are all small-posibility events which we might seldomly meet in our daily work or life. In conclusion, we can still identify that perception is very important to visualization.

References

Wolfe, J. M., Klempen, N., and Dahlen, K. Postattentive vision. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance 26, 2 (2000), 693–716.
Graphical Perception: Theory, Experimentation, and Application to the Development of Graphical Methods, William S. Cleveland; Robert McGill, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 79, No. 387. (Sep., 1984), pp. 531-554.
Crowdsourcing Graphical Perception: Using Mechanical Turk to Assess Visualization Design, Jeffrey Heer and Michael Bostock, Computer Science Department Stanford University
[Fekete et al., 2008] Fekete. J.. Wijk, J. J., Stasko. J. T.. and North, C. 2008. The Value of Information Visualization. in Information Visualization: Human-Centered Issues and Perspectives, A. Kerren. J. T. Stasko, J Fekete. and C. North. Eds. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 4950. Springer-Verlag. Berlin, Heidelberg, 1-18.
Information Visualization: Perception for Design By Colin Ware