Mapping Color to Meaning in Colormap Data Visualizations

To interpret data visualizations, people must determine how visual features map onto concepts. For example, to interpret colormaps, people must determine how dimensions of color (e.g., lightness, hue) map onto quantities of a given measure (e.g., brain activity, correlation magnitude). This process is easier when the encoded mappings in the visualization match people's predictions of how visual features will map onto concepts, their inferred mappings. To harness this principle in visualization design, it is necessary to understand what factors determine people's inferred mappings. In this study, we investigated how inferred color-quantity mappings for colormap data visualizations were influenced by the background color. Prior literature presents seemingly conflicting accounts of how the background color affects inferred color-quantity mappings. The present results help resolve those conflicts, demonstrating that sometimes the background has an effect and sometimes it does not, depending on whether the colormap appears to vary in opacity. When there is no apparent variation in opacity, participants infer that darker colors map to larger quantities (dark-is-more bias). As apparent variation in opacity increases, participants become biased toward inferring that more opaque colors map to larger quantities (opaque-is-more bias). These biases work together on light backgrounds and conflict on dark backgrounds. Under such conflicts, the opaque-is-more bias can negate, or even supersede the dark-is-more bias. The results suggest that if a design goal is to produce colormaps that match people's inferred mappings and are robust to changes in background color, it is beneficial to use colormaps that will not appear to vary in opacity on any background color, and to encode larger quantities in darker colors.