The Curse of Knowledge in Visual Data Communication

• Published in: IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics Vol. 26; no. 10; pp. 3051 - 3062
• Main Authors: Xiong, Cindy, Van Weelden, Lisanne, Franconeri, Steven
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.10.2020; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Cognition; Cognitive biases; Data communication; Data mining; Data visualization; Decision making; expertise; information visualization; perception and cognition; Psychology; Salience; Visual perception; Visualization

A viewer can extract many potential patterns from any set of visualized data values. But that means that two people can see different patterns in the same visualization, potentially leading to miscommunication. Here, we show that when people are primed to see one pattern in the data as visually sali...