Individual differences and the conundrums of user-centered design: two experiments
Journal of the American Society for Information Science - Special topic issue: individual differences in virtual environments
Individual differences in a spatial-semantic virtual environment
Journal of the American Society for Information Science - Special topic issue: individual differences in virtual environments
INFOVIS '04 Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization
Exploring the role of individual differences in information visualization
AVI '08 Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces
The Shaping of Information by Visual Metaphors
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
TIARA: a visual exploratory text analytic system
Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
Do Mechanical Turks dream of square pie charts?
Proceedings of the 3rd BELIV'10 Workshop: BEyond time and errors: novel evaLuation methods for Information Visualization
Cartogram visualization for nonlinear manifold learning models
Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery
Influencing visual judgment through affective priming
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Interfacing real-time ozone information
Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on MapInteraction
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Understanding information visualization is more than a matter of reading a series of data values; it is also a matter of incorporating a visual structure into one's own thinking about a problem. We have proposed visual metaphors as a framework for understanding high-level visual structure and its effect on visualization use. Although there is some evidence that visual metaphors can affect visualization use, the nature of this effect is still ambiguous. We propose that a user's preconceived metaphors for data and other individual differences play an important role in her ability to think in a variety of visual metaphors, and subsequently in her ability to use a visualization. We test this hypothesis by conducting a study in which a participant's preconceptions and thinking style were compared with the degree to which she is affected by conflicting metaphors in a visualization and its task questions. The results show that metaphor compatibility has a significant effect on accuracy, but that factors such as spatial ability and personality can lessen this effect. We also find a complex influence of self-reported metaphor preference on performance. These findings shed light on how people use visual metaphors to understand a visualization.