The Psychology of Data Visualization

2025-01-14

Rick Gilmore

Prelude

Iso (2016)

A picture is worth a thousand words…

  • “An adage in multiple languages…” Wikipedia
  • Theme for the course
  • What words does this figure convey…

Lindsey (2024)

Today

  • Introduction to the course
  • Visualization in psychological science

Introduction to the course

People

  • Sara He, MS, Graduate Student
  • Rick Gilmore, Professor of Psychology

https://databrary.org https://play-project.org https://penn-state-open-science.github.io

Qian, Berenbaum, & Gilmore (2022)

Gilmore, Thomas, & Fesi (2016)

https://acousticbrew.org

https://www.nextstagetheatre.org

https://cpoclub.org

Why this course, why now

My journey

  • Cognitive Science major, psycholinguistics & semiotics minor
  • Introduced to vision science via Marr and J.J. Gibson
  • Research in visual development, visual neuroscience

Many analysts

Figure 2 from Silberzahn et al. (2018)

Many failures

Visualizing the ’Many Analysts – Silberzahn et al. (2018) – data

“Plot your data!”

Gilmore’s graduate statistics professor

“The Datasaurus dozen - same stats, different graphs | Autodesk Research” (n.d.); Matejka & Fitzmaurice (2017)

“The Datasaurus dozen - same stats, different graphs | Autodesk Research” (n.d.); Matejka & Fitzmaurice (2017)

Huff (1993)

Monmonier (2018)

Vision can be unreliable or ambiguous

https://www.indexventures.com/perspectives/data-not-software-is-eating-the-world/

Purpose & goals

  • What are data? Where do data come from?
  • Who visualizes data, how do they visualize it, and why?
  • How does vision science inform how we perceive patterns in data?
  • What’s the relationship between non-visual and visual ways of understanding data?
  • What makes a data visualization effective?
  • What makes a data visualization misleading?
  • How can we make better data visualizations?

Schedule

https://psu-psychology.github.io/psych-490-data-viz-2025-spring/schedule.html

Exercises & evaluation

  • Exercises
    • 8 @ 10 pts/each
    • Top 4 count
    • Others count toward partial extra credit up to 10 pts
  • Attendance (up to 40 points)
  • Final project (40 points)

Resources

  • Articles
    • Retrieve them yourself via the URL (uniform resource locator) and the DOI (digital object identifier).
    • Why do I do this?

Structure

  • Meet 2x weekly
    • Tuesday & Thursday
    • Lecture + discussion + work session
  • Do your homework

This is a seminar…

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/seminar

Culture & climate

  • Creating a community of inquiry
  • Encouraging vigorous & constructive criticism
  • Criticism of work/ideas/behaviors vs. people
    • ‘Smith thinks that pigs can fly.’
    • ‘Smith is an idiot.’
    • ‘Smith tried to demonstrate that pigs can fly by tossing a few off the roof of Old Main. That’s nonsense and made a huge mess.’

Visualization in psychological science

Exercise 01

Main points

  • Visualizing data is important
  • Visualizing data is interesting

Next time

The semiotics of data visualization

Resources

References

Gilmore, R. O., Thomas, A. L., & Fesi, J. (2016). Children’s brain responses to optic flow vary by pattern type and motion speed. PloS One, 11, e0157911. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0157911
Huff, D. (1993). How to lie with statistics. New York, NY: WW Norton. Retrieved from https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728
Iso, A. (2016). Bread - if original [1971]. Youtube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQyKMueMFGk
Lindsey, R. (2024, April 9). Climate change: Atmospheric carbon dioxide. Retrieved November 8, 2024, from http://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide
Matejka, J., & Fitzmaurice, G. (2017). Same stats, different graphs: Generating datasets with varied appearance and identical statistics through simulated annealing. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025912
Monmonier, M. (2018). How to lie with maps (3rd ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226436081.001.0001
Qian, Y., Berenbaum, S. A., & Gilmore, R. O. (2022). Vision contributes to sex differences in spatial cognition and activity interests. Scientific Reports, 12, 17623. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-22269-y
Silberzahn, R., Uhlmann, E. L., Martin, D. P., Anselmi, P., Aust, F., Awtrey, E., … Nosek, B. A. (2018). Many analysts, one data set: Making transparent how variations in analytic choices affect results. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 1, 337–356. https://doi.org/10.1177/2515245917747646
The Datasaurus dozen - same stats, different graphs | Autodesk Research. (n.d.). Retrieved June 2, 2019, from https://www.autodeskresearch.com/publications/samestats