Developments in data visualization research have enabled visualization systems to achieve great general usability and application across a variety of domains. These advancements have improved not only people’s understanding of data, but also the general understanding of people themselves, and how they interact with visualization systems. In particular, researchers have gradually come to recognize the deficiency of having one-size-fits-all visualization interfaces, and have shown that the effectiveness of a visualization tool depends on the experience, personality, and cognitive abilities of the user. This work has also demonstrated that these individual traits can have significant implications for tools that support reasoning and decision-making with data. However, most studies in this area to date have involved only short-duration tasks performed by lay users. In this talk, we will review the research perspectives, as well as the personality traits and cognitive abilities, visualizations, tasks, and measures investigated in the existing literature. We will then present a preliminary analysis of a series of exercises with 22 trained intelligence analysts that seeks to deepen our understanding of how individual differences modulate expert behavior in complex analysis tasks.

 

Speaker: 

R. Jordan Crouser is a visual analytics researcher, semi-professional data wrangler, and an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Smith College. His research program investigates the complementary nature of human and machine computation as used in visual analytics and other human-machine collaborative systems. These systems make use of the human visual system, as well as our capacity to understand and reason about complex data. He has published his technical contributions in the areas of visualization theory, human-computer interaction, educational technology, visual analytics systems and human computation. Prior to returning to academia, Crouser spent two years doing research and building analytical tools at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.