Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Reaction: Attention and Visual Memory in Visualization and Computer Graphics


The paper discusses the role of human perception in information visualization.It tells how human mind perceives to certain visualization and graphics and is a good attempt to study those.

I think apart from human perception, authors have used some basic elements of Human computer interaction that were quite relevant to the study. I'd in fact consider Information Visualization as an integral part of HCI. For example, the eye-fixation (saccade) concept is an important part of HCI and I think it's a good idea to merge that with the designs of information visualizations.

I particularly found this paper interesting when the authors tries to corelate the attention span of human mind with respect to the colors, text and other factors and how change blindness can completely change the perception for human visualization. I think probably these are some of the facts that most of the web companies use to target their advertisements. For example, putting a red font for ads may attract more attention than putting a yellow colored text.

Also, I think visual memory is quite an important factor in designing visualizations as mentioned by the authors. Humans certainly have quite short span of concentration and if we are creating a new visualization design, we should take care that users shouldn't be require to remember anything for long.

Overall, I found this paper to be quite useful for anyone who wants to understand the role of such factors in designing much better information visualizations



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