Context Matters: A Theory of Semantic Discriminability for Perceptual Encoding Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces semantic discriminability theory, explaining how the context of concept sets influences the ability to interpret colors in visualizations, supported by experiments showing robustness of color meanings.

Contribution

It formalizes semantic discriminability theory, linking concept set context to color interpretability, and demonstrates its validity through empirical experiments.

Findings

Color-concept association differences constrain discriminability

Colors can be interpreted for 'non-colorable' concepts in context

Semantic discriminability enhances visual communication robustness

Abstract

People's associations between colors and concepts influence their ability to interpret the meanings of colors in information visualizations. Previous work has suggested such effects are limited to concepts that have strong, specific associations with colors. However, although a concept may not be strongly associated with any colors, its mapping can be disambiguated in the context of other concepts in an encoding system. We articulate this view in semantic discriminability theory, a general framework for understanding conditions determining when people can infer meaning from perceptual features. Semantic discriminability is the degree to which observers can infer a unique mapping between visual features and concepts. Semantic discriminability theory posits that the capacity for semantic discriminability for a set of concepts is constrained by the difference between the feature-concept association distributions across the concepts in the set. We define formal properties of this theory and test its implications in two experiments. The results show that the capacity to produce semantically discriminable colors for sets of concepts was indeed constrained by the statistical distance between color-concept association distributions (Experiment 1). Moreover, people could interpret meanings of colors in bar graphs insofar as the colors were semantically discriminable, even for concepts previously considered "non-colorable" (Experiment 2). The results suggest that colors are more robust for visual communication than previously thought.