Visual features as carriers of abstract quantitative information.

Four experiments investigated the extent to which abstract quantitative information can be conveyed by basic visual features. This was done by asking observers to estimate and discriminate Pearson correlation in graphical representations where the first data dimension of each element was encoded by its horizontal position, and the second by the value of one of its visual features; perceiving correlation then requires combining the information in the two encodings via a common abstract representation. Four visual features were examined: luminance, color, orientation, and size.

Visualization as a stimulus domain for vision science.

Traditionally, vision science and information/data visualization have interacted by using knowledge of human vision to help design effective displays. It is argued here, however, that this interaction can also go in the opposite direction: the investigation of successful visualizations can lead to the discovery of interesting new issues and phenomena in visual perception. Various studies are reviewed showing how this has been done for two areas of visualization, namely, graphical representations and interaction, which lend themselves to work on visual processing and the control of visual operations, respectively.

A psychologically based taxonomy of Magicians' forcing Techniques: How magicians influence our choices, and how to use this to study psychological mechanisms.

Magicians have developed a wide range of techniques to influence and control spectators' choices of such things as card, word, or number. These techniques are what is called forcing. The present paper develops a psychologically-based taxonomy of forcing techniques with two goals in mind.

Correlation Judgment and Visualization Features: A Comparative Study.

Recent visualization research efforts have incorporated experimental techniques and perceptual models from the vision science community. Perceptual laws such as Weber's law, for example, have been used to model the perception of correlation in scatterplots. While this thread of research has progressively refined the modeling of the perception of correlation in scatterplots, it remains unclear as to why such perception can be modeled using relatively simple functions, e.

To Have Seen or Not to Have Seen: A Look at Rensink, O'Regan, and Clark (1997).

Rensink, O'Regan, and Clark drew attention to the phenomenon of change blindness, in which even large changes can be difficult to notice if made during the appearance of motion transients elsewhere in the image. This article provides a sketch of the events that inspired that article as well as its subsequent impact on psychological science and on society at large.

Cultural Differences in Visual Search for Geometric Figures.

While some studies suggest cultural differences in visual processing, others do not, possibly because the complexity of their tasks draws upon high-level factors that could obscure such effects. To control for this, we examined cultural differences in visual search for geometric figures, a relatively simple task for which the underlying mechanisms are reasonably well known. We replicated earlier results showing that North Americans had a reliable search asymmetry for line length: Search for long among short lines was faster than vice versa.

The nature of correlation perception in scatterplots.

For scatterplots with gaussian distributions of dots, the perception of Pearson correlation r can be described by two simple laws: a linear one for discrimination, and a logarithmic one for perceived magnitude (Rensink & Baldridge, 2010). The underlying perceptual mechanisms, however, remain poorly understood. To cast light on these, four different distributions of datapoints were examined.

Group-level differences in visual search asymmetry.

East Asians and Westerners differ in various aspects of perception and cognition. For example, visual memory for East Asians is believed to be more influenced by the contextual aspects of a scene than is the case for Westerners (Masuda & Nisbett in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 922-934, 2001). There are also differences in visual search: For Westerners, search is faster for a long line among short ones than for a short line among long ones, whereas this difference does not appear to hold for East Asians (Ueda et al.

The Vanishing Ball Illusion: A new perspective on the perception of dynamic events.

Our perceptual experience is largely based on prediction, and as such can be influenced by knowledge of forthcoming events. This susceptibility is commonly exploited by magicians. In the Vanishing Ball Illusion, for example, a magician tosses a ball in the air a few times and then pretends to throw the ball again, whilst secretly concealing it in his hand.

A Principled Way of Assessing Visualization Literacy.

We describe a method for assessing the visualization literacy (VL) of a user. Assessing how well people understand visualizations has great value for research (e. g.

A framework for using magic to study the mind.

Over the centuries, magicians have developed extensive knowledge about the manipulation of the human mind-knowledge that has been largely ignored by psychology. It has recently been argued that this knowledge could help improve our understanding of human cognition and consciousness. But how might this be done? And how much could it ultimately contribute to the exploration of the human mind? We propose here a framework outlining how knowledge about magic can be used to help us understand the human mind.

Influencing choice without awareness.

Forcing occurs when a magician influences the audience's decisions without their awareness. To investigate the mechanisms behind this effect, we examined several stimulus and personality predictors. In Study 1, a magician flipped through a deck of playing cards while participants were asked to choose one.

A psychologically-based taxonomy of misdirection.

Magicians use misdirection to prevent you from realizing the methods used to create a magical effect, thereby allowing you to experience an apparently impossible event. Magicians have acquired much knowledge about misdirection, and have suggested several taxonomies of misdirection. These describe many of the fundamental principles in misdirection, focusing on how misdirection is achieved by magicians.

Limits to the usability of iconic memory.

Human vision briefly retains a trace of a stimulus after it disappears. This trace-iconic memory-is often believed to be a surrogate for the original stimulus, a representational structure that can be used as if the original stimulus were still present. To investigate its nature, a flicker-search paradigm was developed that relied upon a full scan (rather than partial report) of its contents.

Perceptual and cognitive characteristics of common playing cards.

We examined the perceptual and cognitive characteristics of the playing cards commonly used in the Western world. Specifically, we measured their visibility, memorability, likability, and verbal and visual accessibility. Based on visibility and memorability, four groups of cards were distinguished: the Ace of Spades, other Aces, number cards, and face cards.

Expression of nonconscious knowledge via ideomotor actions.

Ideomotor actions are behaviours that are unconsciously initiated and express a thought rather than a response to a sensory stimulus. The question examined here is whether ideomotor actions can also express nonconscious knowledge. We investigated this via the use of implicit long-term semantic memory, which is not available to conscious recall.

Facilitating the analysis of immunological data with visual analytic techniques.

Visual analytics (VA) has emerged as a new way to analyze large dataset through interactive visual display. We demonstrated the utility and the flexibility of a VA approach in the analysis of biological datasets. Examples of these datasets in immunology include flow cytometry, Luminex data, and genotyping (e.

Perceptual limits on the visual monitoring task.

A brief review is presented of recent work in vision science showing important limits on the ability of observers to carry out various tasks. First, it has been found that only a few moving items can be tracked at any time, even after considerable practice. Second, observers can often miss the appearance of unexpected objects or events, even if these are large.

Towards a science of magic.

It is argued here that cognitive science currently neglects an important source of insight into the human mind: the effects created by magicians. Over the centuries, magicians have learned how to perform acts that are perceived as defying the laws of nature, and that induce a strong sense of wonder. This article argues that the time has come to examine the scientific bases behind such phenomena, and to create a science of magic linked to relevant areas of cognitive science.

Consequences of display changes during interrupted visual search: rapid resumption is target specific.

Visual search can be resumed more rapidly following a brief interruption to an old display than it can be initiated on a new display, pointing to a critical role for memory in search (Lleras, Rensink, & Enns, 2005). Here, we examine how this rapid resumption is affected by changes made to the display during the interruption of search. Rapid resumption was found to depend on the prior presentation of the target, not merely the distractor items (Experiment 1), and was unaffected by the relocation of all distractor items (Experiment 2).

The rapid extraction of numeric meaning.

Several kinds of statistical properties can be rapidly extracted from visual displays (e.g., luminance and roughness, Olive, A.

Rapid resumption of interrupted visual search. New insights on the interaction between vision and memory.

A modified visual search task demonstrates that humans are very good at resuming a search after it has been momentarily interrupted. This is shown by exceptionally rapid response time to a display that reappears after a brief interruption, even when an entirely different visual display is seen during the interruption and two different visual searches are performed simultaneously. This rapid resumption depends on the stability of the visual scene and is not due to display or response anticipations.

The influence of cast shadows on visual search.

We show that cast shadows can have a significant influence on the speed of visual search. In particular, we find that search based on the shape of a region is affected when the region is darker than the background and corresponds to a shadow formed by lighting from above. Results support the proposal that an early-level system rapidly identifies regions as shadows and then discounts them, making their shapes more difficult to access.