Beyond Memorability: Visualization Recognition and Recall

In this paper we move beyond memorability and investigate how visualizations are recognized and recalled. For this study we labeled a dataset of 393 visualizations and analyzed the eye movements of 33 participants as well as thousands of participant-generated text descriptions of the visualizations. This allowed us to determine what components of a visualization attract people's attention, and what information is encoded into memory. Our findings quantitatively support many conventional qualitative design guidelines, including that (1) titles and supporting text should convey the message of a visualization, (2) if used appropriately, pictograms do not interfere with understanding and can improve recognition, and (3) redundancy helps effectively communicate the message. Importantly, we show that visualizations memorable “at-a-glance” are also capable of effectively conveying the message of the visualization. Thus, a memorable visualization is often also an effective one.

1 Introduction

Understanding the perceptual and cognitive processing of a visualization is essential for effective data presentation as well as communication to the viewer. Memorability, a basic cognitive concept, has important implications for both the design of visualizations that will be remembered but also lays the groundwork for understanding higher cognitive functions such as comprehension. In our previous study [8], the memorability scores for hundreds of real-world visualizations were collected on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (AMT). The results of this research demonstrate that visualizations have inherent memorability, consistent across different groups of observers. We also found that the most memorable visualization types are those that are visually distinct (e.g., diagrams, tree and network diagrams, etc.), and that elements such as color, visual complexity, and recognizable objects increase a visualization's memorability. However a few questions remain: What visual elements do people actually pay attention to when examining a visualization? What are the differences in memorability when given more time to view a visualization? What information do people use to recognize a visualization? What exactly do people recall about a visualization?