Show or Tell? Visual and Verbal Representations Bias Position Recall

TL;DR

This study investigates how visual and verbal representations of data positions in charts are biased differently, revealing that visual responses underestimate while verbal responses overestimate positions, highlighting modality-specific biases.

Contribution

It demonstrates that biases in position recall vary with response modality, showing opposite effects in visual and verbal representations for simple line data.

Findings

Visual responses underestimate position

Verbal responses overestimate position

Bias direction depends on modality

Abstract

When we view visualizations, we not only have a visual representation of the data, but also a verbal one. Recent work has shown that these visual representations of data can be biased, such that the position of a line in a chart will be consistently underestimated. But are the verbal representations of position encodings also biased in the same manner, or is this a purely visual bias that can be mitigated with verbal context? We explored the bias in position reproductions for simple uniform lines for both visual and verbal representations. We find that the direction of the bias changed depending on the response modality, with visual reproductions showing a position underestimation while verbal responses showed overestimation. This finding indicates that, even for simple line charts, biases are still present for both visual and verbal representations, although the directionality of this bias depends on the modality.