Impact of Cognitive Biases on Progressive Visualization

Marianne Procopio, Ab Mosca, Carlos Scheidegger, Eugene Wu, Remco Chang

External link (DOI)
View presentation:2021-10-28T17:45:00ZGMT-0600Change your timezone on the schedule page
2021-10-28T17:45:00Z
Exemplar figure, described by caption below
Progressive visualization of a bar chart. Data is sampled and a new estimate is calculated at each iteration. The error bars represent the 95% confidence interval of the estimated value. The color indicates the relative error of the estimate. The darker the blue, the more accurate the estimate is. Progressive visualization is a beneficial technique but users need to be cautious of potential cognitive biases.
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Direct link to video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/FonisZGrIe0

Keywords

Data visualization, Uncertainty, Bars, Task analysis, Real-time systems, Query processing, Data analysis

Abstract

Progressive visualization is fast becoming a technique in the visualization community to help users interact with large amounts of data. With progressive visualization, users can examine intermediate results of complex or long running computations, without waiting for the computation to complete. While this has shown to be beneficial to users, recent research has identified potential risks. For example, users may misjudge the uncertainty in the intermediate results and draw incorrect conclusions or see patterns that are not present in the final results. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive set of studies to quantify the advantages and limitations of progressive visualization. Based on a recent report by Micallef et al., we examine four types of cognitive biases that can occur with progressive visualization: uncertainty bias, illusion bias, control bias, and anchoring bias. The results of the studies suggest a cautious but promising use of progressive visualization — while there can be significant savings in task completion time, accuracy can be negatively affected in certain conditions. These findings confirm earlier reports of the benefits and drawbacks of progressive visualization and that continued research into mitigating the effects of cognitive biases is necessary.