A Survey of Perception-Based Visualization Studies by Task

TL;DR

This survey comprehensively reviews perception-based visualization studies since 1980, focusing on how perception influences visualization effectiveness and providing insights for task-optimized design improvements.

Contribution

It offers a systematic overview of perception-related visualization research, categorizing techniques by visual encoding and visualization type, and highlights open questions and weaknesses.

Findings

Perception is crucial for evaluating visualization effectiveness.

Visualization techniques vary significantly based on perception principles.

Identifies gaps and future research directions in perception-based visualization.

Abstract

Knowledge of human perception has long been incorporated into visualizations to enhance their quality and effectiveness. The last decade, in particular, has shown an increase in perception-based visualization research studies. With all of this recent progress, the visualization community lacks a comprehensive guide to contextualize their results. In this report, we provide a systematic and comprehensive review of research studies on perception related to visualization. This survey reviews perception-focused visualization studies since 1980 and summarizes their research developments focusing on low-level tasks, further breaking techniques down by visual encoding and visualization type. In particular, we focus on how perception is used to evaluate the effectiveness of visualizations, to help readers understand and apply the principles of perception of their visualization designs through a task-optimized approach. We concluded our report with a summary of the weaknesses and open research questions in the area.