Paper Info
Title
A model of symbol size discrimination in scatterplots
Abstract
Symbols are used in scatterplots to encode data in a way that is appropriate for perception through human visual channels. Symbol size is believed to be the second dominant channel after color. We study symbol size perception in scatterplots in the context of analytic tasks requiring size discrimination. More specifically, we performed an experiment to measure human performance in three visual analytic tasks. Circles are used as the representative symbol, with eight, linearly varying radii; 24 persons, divided across three groups, participated; and both objective and subjective measures were obtained. We propose a model to describe the results. The perception of size is assumed to be an early step in the complex cognitive process to mediate discrimination, and psychophysical laws are used to describe this perceptual mapping. Different mapping schemes are compared by regression on the experimental data. The results show that approximate homogeneity of size perception exists in our complex tasks and can be closely described by a power law transformation with an exponent of 0.4. This yields an optimal scale for symbol size discrimination.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1145/1753326.1753714
human factors in computing systems
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
size perception,complex cognitive process,representative symbol,symbol size perception,symbol size,complex task,size discrimination,different mapping scheme,symbol size discrimination,analytic task,human performance,user experience,cognitive process,visual analytics,power law
Conference
16
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.71
3
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jing Li1996.73
Jean-Bernard Martens2944141.57
Jarke J. van Wijk33841275.42