Cognitive effects of animated visualization in exploratory visual data analysis

The goal of this research is to study the role and effects of the use of animated information visualization in the early stages of exploratory data analysis tasks. Despite the existence of a large body of research on information visualization, there is little known regarding how and when one should use and how to interact with animated visualization to help explore data. By animated visualization, we mean a type of information visualization technique that produces autonomous motions of representations. This research explored the issue from two aspects: what cognitive effects animated information visualization has, and what interactions people have with animated visualization when exploring data. We conducted two user studies to investigate each aspect, and identified research challenges for designing an interactive animated information visualization environment that supports the early stages of exploratory data analysis. These findings help us further study how to extend the notions developed in spatial visualization to temporal visualization - e.g. what focus+context means when applied to the time dimension in animated visualization.