A couple of people critiqued our paper, “How Capacity Limits of Attention Influence Information Visualization Effectiveness,” which won the best paper award at InfoVis 2012.

The criticism is largely centered on which colors we used, namely their luminance and contrast. The criticism is based on a misunderstanding or misreading of our paper.

We have two responses:

1. Target and distractor colors were selected randomly for each trial and fully counterbalanced; every target color was also used as a distractor. Color and/or luminance pop-out, and discriminability differences between targets and distractors do not explain the results. Rather, grouping modulates search efficiency: Here is a demo.
2. Color and luminance contrast explanations do not explain our results for motion. Here is a demo.