Interaction with Information for Visual Reasoning

Summary

Scientific and information visualization researchers routinely build and evaluate interactive visualization systems to aid human reasoning. However, this work is often disconnected from the methodological and theoretical tools developed by the cognitive and social sciences to address the complexities of human thought processes. Those tools and methods can help us to understand human perception and understanding of data visualization, but typically do not address how rich interaction with computational processes could be engineered to support better decision-making. Yet, an increasing number of researchers are turning to the question of how to best engineer interaction techniques for visualization and how to best study and understand their influence on cognition, insight formation, and also efficiency and effectiveness of work. The goal of this seminar was to bring together researchers in cognitive science and psychology with researchers in the field of visualization to discuss the value that interaction can bring to visualization, how best to study it, and how research on interaction in cognitive science can be best integrated into visualization tools and systems to the benefit of domain experts or casual users of these tools.