Graphical perception assignment

Data visualization is to aid in making better decision, which is utilized by people to understand patterns, trends or relationships from visuals. This is called picturing insights from data. In fact, people see images with our brains instead of our eyes. Therefore, perception in visualization can be explained as what’s inside people’s brain when they see something through their eyes.

There are three key points for understand further about visual perception. Visual perception is selective : people selectively choose the images which catch their attention. Otherwise, people will be overwhelmed by everything that comes into their mind. Our eyes are drawn to familiar patterns: since visual perception is selective, which means they are quite subjective. We see what we want to see, we know what we want to know. When looking at a visual, we have limitation to in our memory. Data visualization is an external tool to improve our working memory, which transfer the balance between perception and cognition to utilize brain’s capabilities to its advantage.

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Three types of memories in our brains are used to process information which are iconic memory or sensory memory, working memory and long-term memory. The iconic memory and working memory are the memories which interact with visualization.

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Data visualization make use of chunking, which is the capacity of working memory is able to be increased by a process to gather similar stuff together. The importance of perception visualization is the ability to get more complex information than what we’ve seen and heard.

Reference:

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. 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. Elliott, Kennedy. “39 Studies about Human Perception in 30 Minutes - Kennedy Elliott - Medium.” Medium, Medium, 2 May 2016,