Attention Capacity

How capacity limits of attention impact visualization

Collaborators:

Steve Haroz: Computer Science Department - UC Davis

David Whitney: Psychology Department - UC Berkeley

Publications

[Poster] Steve Haroz, William Prinzmetal, David Whitney. Serial Search Can Occur in Multiple Feature Dimensions at the Same Time Vision Sciences Society 2014 (pdf)

[Poster] Steve Haroz, David Whitney. Global – Not Local – Variance Impacts Search. Vision Sciences Society 2013 (pdf)

Steve Haroz, David Whitney, "How Capacity Limits of Attention Influence Visualization Effectiveness," IEEE Transactions on Visualization & Computer Graphics, vol. 18, no. 12, 2012 (pdf)

Purpose

The capacity of attention is limited. How does this limitation impact visualization? Our experiments show that the answer depends on layout, user task, and number of feature varieties (bins).

Find the unique color

Each display has one unique color. Notice that finding it is much easer for the grouped displays.

Find the unique motion

Each display has one unique motion. Notice that finding it is much easer for the grouped displays.