From cognition to understanding

2025-02-18

Rick Gilmore

Overview

Announcements

Assigned today: Final Project proposal

Last time…

Pre-attentive vs. attentive vision
Gestalt principles
- Your findings

Today

From specifc to general; concrete to abstract
The comparing brain

From specific to general

Figure 7.3 from Cairo (2013)

Bottom-up and top-down

Figure 7.5 from Cairo (2013)

Figure 7.6 from Cairo (2013)

How large is the memory bank?

Figure 7.8 from Cairo (2013)

When less detail > more

Figure 7.11 from Cairo (2013)

Abstraction to the rescue

Figure 7.7 from Cairo (2013)

Some parts > others

Figure 7.9 from Cairo (2013)

Back to visualizations

Franconeri, Padilla, Shah, Zacks, & Hullman (2021)
“Visualizations let viewers see beyond summary statistics”

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

Franconeri et al. (2021)

“Visual channels translate numbers into images”

Figure 2 from Franconeri et al. (2021)

Hard to map without distortion

Figure 3 from Franconeri et al. (2021)

https://www.wcpo.com/news/state/state-ohio/ohio-senate-bans-diversity-initiatives-polices-topics-taught-in-name-of-free-speech-on-college-campuses

Debate is the American way

Debate is the scholarly way

Show me the data!
Evidence + logical argument
Plus rigorous self-criticism

Scientific norms (Merton, 1973)

Communalism (common ownership)
Universalism (independent validity)
Disinterestedness (public benefit)
Organized skepticism (scrutinize everything)

Merton (1973)

The mores of science possess a methodologic rationale…They are procedurally efficent…

Discover more, faster…

Feynman (1974)

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that…”

Lindsey (2024)

How are CO₂ concentrations related to warming? infographic by Fakta o klimatu, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

The U.S. is only one country

Ferrell (2025)

\(CO_2\) emissions (per capita) by rich countries

https://rick-gilmore.com/posts/data-stories-climate-change/

\(CO_2\) emissions (per GDP) by rich countries

https://rick-gilmore.com/posts/data-stories-climate-change-II/

Final project check-in

Next time

Designing efficient & understandable visualizations

Resources

References

Cairo, A. (2013). The functional art: An introduction to information graphics and visualization. Upper Saddle River, N: New Riders Publishing.

Ferrell, J. (2025, February 10). January was coldest in U.S. Since 1988 but globe was warmest ever. Retrieved February 17, 2025, from https://www.accuweather.com/en/climate/january-was-coldest-in-u-s-since-1988-but-globe-was-warmest-ever/1743438

Feynman, R. P. (1974). Cargo cult science. Retrieved from https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

Franconeri, S. L., Padilla, L. M., Shah, P., Zacks, J. M., & Hullman, J. (2021). The science of visual data communication: What works. Psychological Science in the Public Interest: A Journal of the American Psychological Society, 22(3), 110–161. https://doi.org/10.1177/15291006211051956

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

Merton, R. W. (1973). The normative structure of science. In R. K. Merton & N. W. Storer (Eds.), The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations (pp. 267–278). The University of Chicago Press.

The Datasaurus dozen - same stats, different graphs | Autodesk Research. (n.d.). Retrieved June 2, 2019, from https://www.autodeskresearch.com/publications/samestats