Recently some colleagues shared an interesting documentary video (embedded above, from 3:00 onwards) about how the Himba perceive colors, and how language plays an important role in shaping color perception. It seems intuitive to us that visual perception, especially pre-attentive processing, is hard-wired in the brain. That is, endowed with the same neurological machinery, every […]
Q: All these terms, mental models, schemas, coordination, etc. they are pretty fuzzy and not definite. I believe that to understand how InfoVis works we must understand how the brain works. A: First, understanding a phenomenon often involves multiple levels of description and explanation (e.g. the famous AI researcher David Marr proposed three levels of […]
I got an email inquiry asking why I chose to look at mental models instead of schemata in this year’s InfoVis paper. What are schemata? Like the term “mental model”, the meaning of “schema” as used to refer to people’s internal mental representation has also been ambiguous. To some people, mental model is just a […]
How can cognitive science inform InfoVis and what cognitive research work is relevant for InfoVis? Cognition is such a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that there are diverse approaches of studying it. Perhaps not every approach is relevant for InfoVis. Some, for example, look at the neurological basis of cognition, mapping different brain areas to different […]
During this year’s VisWeek (truly great conferences, I must say), some friends expressed interests in my work on theoretical / cognitive approaches to InfoVis. They complained however that my papers were no easy read - which was a bit surprising to me. I’ve tried very hard to make the arguments understandable, and you would believe […]
All visualizations are actually cultural artifacts. Saying that a scatter plot or a Treemap is cultural however is not particularly meaningful or resonating to members within the western culture. Our thoughts are so significantly influenced and structured by the culture we are immersed in, that culture is transparent and sometimes trivial to us. Cultural aspects […]