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Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision To Think

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Readings in Information Visualization, Using vision to think
Stuart T. Kard, Jock D. Mackinlay, Ben Scheiderman

As this 15-year period draws to a close, there is a need for collecting together the results
to date, organizing them, understanding the essence of this field, and providing materials
for teaching. In the next period, information visualization will pass out of the realm of an
exotic research specialty and into mainstream of user interface application design.” (xiii)

“The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated. Without external aids, memory,
thought, and reasoning are all constrained. But human intelligence is highly flexible
and adaptable, superb at inventing procedures and objects that overcome its own
limits. The real powers come from devising external aids: it is things that make us
smart” (Norman, 1993, p.43) (1)

But then direct computational devises themselves become a component of an even more
powerful visually based system. (3)

As our brief examination illustrates, visual artifacts aid thought; in fact, they are
completely entwined with cognition action.

Information visualization is just about that—exploiting the dynamic, interactive,

inexpensive medium of graphical computers to devise new external aids that
enhance cognitive abilities. (5)

Visualization: The use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of data to

amplify cognition. (6)
Cognition is the acquisition or use of knowledge. This definition has the virtue of focusing
as much on the purpose of visualization as the means. Hamming (1973) saud, “the
purpose of computation is insight, not numbers.” Likewise for visualization, “the purpose of
visualization is insight not pictures.” The main goals of this insight are discovery, decision
making, and explanation. (6)

Visualization dates as an organized subfield from the NSF report Visualization in Scientific
Computing (McCormick and DeFanti, 1987). There it is conceived as a tool to permit
handling large sets of scientific data and to enhance science’s ability to see phenomena in
the data. Although it is not a necessity of the original conception, scientific visualization
tends to be based on physical data—the human body, the earth, molecules and other. (6)

There is a great deal of such abstract information in the contemporary world, and its
mass and complexity are a problem, motivating attempts to extend visualization into the
realm of the abstract. (7)

External cognition is concerned with the interaction of cognitive representations and

processes across the external/internal boundary in order to support thinking. Information
design is the explicit attempt to design external representations to amplify cognition. Data
Graphics is the design of visual but abstract representations of data for this purpose.
Visualization uses the computer for data graphics. Scientific Visualization is visualization
applied to scientific data. The reasons why these two diverge are that scientific data are
often physically based, whereas business information and other abstract data are often
not.
However, humans with visualization displays are good at picking out new patterns as they
occur and thus can respond to changes in the patterns quickly. Information visualization
allows human adaptivity to be brought to bear for large sets of data under time pressure.
(10)

Readings in Information Visualization, Using vision to think

Stuart T. Kard, Jock D. Mackinlay, Ben Scheiderman

Knowledge crystallization tasks are one form of information-intensive work can

themselves be part of more complex forms of knowledge work, such as design. (11)

1. Information Collecting articles and data

foraging. On laptop computers.

2. Search for Identification of attributes

schema on which to compare.
(representation) laptops.

3. Instantiate schema Make table of laptops x

with data. Residue attributes. Use “remarks”
is significant data column to record interesting
that do not fit the properties that don’t fit into
schema. To reduce table.
Residue, go to
Step 2 and improve
Schema.

4. Problem-solve to Reorder rows and columns

trade off features. Of laptop table. Create plots.
Delete or mark laptops that
Are out of the running.

5. Search for a new Cluster into three groups by

schema that reduces rearranging the rows in the
the problem to a table, one each for power,
simple trade-off. Multimedia capability, and
portability. Within each cluster
delete all but the top one or
two machines.

6. Package the Create concise briefing on

patterns found in decision for workgroup.
Some output
Product.

Knowledge crystallization involves getting insight about data relative to some task. This
usually requires finding some representation (schema) for the data that is efficient for the
task.
There appears to be a general principle of Selective Omission of Information at work in all
biological information processing systems. The sensory organs simplify and organize their
inputs, supplying the higher processing centers with aggregated forms of information
which, to a considerable extent, predetermine the patterned structures that the higher
centers can detect. The higher centers in their turn reduce the quantity of information
which will be processed at later stages by further organization of the partly processed
information into more abstract and universal forms. (Resnikoff, 1987, p.19) (11)

In order to do knowledge crystallization, there must be data, a task, and a schema. If

the data are not to hand, then information visualization can aid in the search for it. If there
is a satisfactory schema, then knowledge crystallization reduces to information retrieval. If
there is not an adequate schema, then knowledge visualization is one of the methods by
which one can be obtained. (11)

We have associated subtasks with particular main tasks of knowledge

crystallization; however, many of the subtasks could be associated with more than
one task.

VISUALIZATION LEVELS OF USE

1) visualization of the inosphere: the information outside the user’s environment.

(www., digital libraries, document collection).
2) visualization of an information workspace is the use of visualization to organize
possibly multiple individual organizations or other information sources and tools to
perform tasks.
3) visual knowledge tools, they arrange information to reveal patterns, or they allow
manipulation of information for finding patterns, or they allow visual calculations.
They are some times called wide widgets to emphasize that they are often not just
presentations but also controls.
4) visual objects. These refer to objects, especially virtual physical objects such as the
human body or books, that have been enhanced with visualization techniques to
package collections of abstract information. (example both conceptual and spatial
browsing data on a human body).

We propose six major ways in which visualizations can amplify cognition.

1) by increasing the memory and processing resources available to the users.
2) By reducing the search for information,
3) By using visual representations to enhance the detection of patterns,
4) By enabling perceptual inference operations,
5) By using perceptual attention mechanisms for monitoring,
6) By encoding information in a manipulable medium
(16)

Data Transformation map Raw Data, that is, data in some idiosyncratic format, into Data
Tables, relational descriptions of data extended to include metadata. Visual Mappings
transform Data Tables into Visual Structures, structures that combine spatial substrates,
marks, and graphical properties. Finally, View Transformations create Views of the Visual
Structures by specifying graphical parameters such as position, scaling,, and clipping.
User interaction controls parameters of these transformations, restricting the view to
certain data ranges, for example, or changing the nature of the transformation. The
visualizations and their controls are used in service of some task. (17)

A tool for discovery and understanding

AUTOMATING THE DESIGN OF GRAPHICAL PRESENTATIONS OF RELATIONAL

INFORMATION
Jack McKinlay Stanford University

3. The Graphical Presentation Problem

The graphical presentation problem is to synthesis a graphical design that
expresses a set of relations and their structural properties effectively. (67)

4. Approach
An expressiveness criterion, which is derived from precise language definition, is
associated with each graphical language. A graphical language can be used to present
some information when it includes a graphical sentence that expresses exactly the imput
information, that is all the information and only the information. Expressing additional
information is potentially dangerous because it may not be correct. (69)

5. Expressivness

All communication is based on the fact that the participants share conventions that
determine how messages are constructed and interpreted. For graphical communication
these conventions indicate how arrangements of graphical objects encode information.
A set of facts is expressible in a language if it contains a sentence that
1.- encodes all the facts in the set,
2.- encodes only the facts in the set. (70)

6. Effectiveness

Given two graphical languages that express some information, the obvious question is
which language involves a design that specifies the more effective presentation.
…unlike expressiveness, which only depends on the syntax and semantics of the
graphical language, effectiveness also depends on the capabilities of the perceiver.

7. Composition

Expressiveness and effectiveness criteria, which were described in the previous two
sections, are not very useful without a method for generating alternative designs. (74)

Information Animation Applications in the Capital Markets.

William Wright, Visible Decisions Inc. Toronto Canada

In 4D information animation applications, the success of the graphics visual design (i.e. the
shapes, layout, colors) is critical to the success of the application. Graphical elements
need to be carefully selected and arranged to reveal data and relationships. Poor
graphics design will obscure the data and its meanings. The visual design simply needs to
be perfect. Users must see the message and not the medium.
 Edward Tufte articulates this discipline best. According to Tufte, excellence in graphics
consists of complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision, and efficiency. Graphical
displays should induce the viewer to think about the substance, present many numbers in
a small space, make large data sets coherent, encourage the eye to compare different
pieces of data, reveal the data at several levels of detail, from a broad overview to the fine
structure.

Information workspaces are not oriented around visualizations themselves, but

around tasks. An information workspace might contain several visualizations related to
one or several tasks.
At the third level are visual knowledge tools or “wide widgets”. These are sort of
visualization tools described in many of the papers so far in this books. They contain a
visual presentation of some data set and a set of controls for interacting with that
presentation. The focus is on determining and extracting the relationships in a
particular set of data.
At a fourth level are visually enhanced objects, coherent information objects enhanced
by the addition of information visualization techniques. (463)

USING VISION TO THINK

This chapter returns to the central topic of this book: using vision to think. In particular, the
focus is on developing theoretical and engineering principles for the design of effective
visualizations.

Moving from information foraging to sense making, we have Pirolli and Rao’s paper
(1996). Sense making basically requires building schema or description into which many
pieces of information fit (Russel et al., 1993), that is, providing a compact description of
some set of phenomena. (580)

. The point of view is primarily cognitive, including the use of the term externalization rather
than visualization to indicate the cognitive role of interactive visual representations. (581)

The first dimension, representation, divides data into value and structure. The second
dimension, interactivity, ranges from direct manipulation to indirect manipulation. This
leads to the final axis of the taxonomy based on Draper’s observation that input and output
can reference each other. These input and output relations form the basis of a more
detailed discussion of the various user actions that must be supported by a visualization.
(581)

CONCLUSIONS

Information visualization is the use of computer-supported interactive visual

representations of abstract data to amplify cognition. Its purpose is not the pictures
themselves, but insight (or rapid information assimilation or monitoring large amounts of
data). Information visualization is a part of the new media made possible by the
development of the real-time visual computer. This medium has promise for five reasons:
1. It brings increased resources to the human in the form of perceptual
processing and expanded working memory.
2. It can reduce the search for information.
 3. It can enhance the recognition patterns.
4. It enables the use of perceptual inference and perceptual monitoring.
The medium itself is manipulable and interactive.

Another potential use of information visualization is in complex documents, such as

scientific papers, technical manuals, film scripts, or computer programs. In each of these,
readers often try to get sense of the whole or to cross-reference one part from the
other.

Information Visualization

Robert Spence
ACM Press Essex: England 2001

Visualization is a process of forming mental model of data, thereby gaining inside into that
data....I concentrate on the acquisition of insight through the identification of patterns and
other features of a display. (xiii)

Visualize: (vb) to forma a mental image or vision of....

Visualize: (vb) to imagine or remember as if actually seeing.
Indeed , it results in something rather ephemeral (which we later call a mental model or
internal model), something that cannot be printed out on paper or viewed through a
microscope. The result is, as we say, internal to the human being. The potential value of
visualization—that of gaining insight and understanding—follows from these definitions but
so also, in view of the cognitive nature of visualization does the difficulty of its study. (1)

Sometimes we refer to the internal model as a cognitve map to distinguish it from a

material map, which is real in the sense of being an object pasted to the wall of the
underground station.

Issues
Selection; representation; presentation; scale and dimensionality; rearrangement,
interaction and exploration; externalization; mental models; invention, experience and skill.
(9-12)

Anyone who has seen, and specially used, a highly responsive interactive visualization
tool will be struck by two features. First, that a mere rearrengement of how the data is
displayed can lead to a surprising degree of additional insight into that data. Second, that
the very property of interactivity can considerably enhance that tool’s effectiveness,
especially if the computer’s response follows a user’s action virtually immediately, say
within a fraction of a second. (14)

ENVISIONING INFORMATION

Edward R. Tufte

Graphic Press. Cheshire, Connecticut 1990

Introduction

To envision information—and what bright and splendid visions can result—is to work at the
intersection of image, word, number, art. (9)

To speak of statistics as the study of variation also serves to emphasize the contrast
between the aim of modern statisticians and those of their predecessors. (22)

We envision information in order to reason about, communicate, document, and preserve

that knowledge—activities nearly always carried out on two-dimensional paper and
computer screen. (33)

2. Micro / Macro Readings

We thrive in information-thick worlds because of our marvelous and everyday capacities to

select, edit, single out, structure, highlight, group, pair, merge, harmonize, synthesize,
focus, organize, condense, reduce, boil down, choose, categorize, catalog, classify, list,
abstract, scan, look into, idealize, isolate, discriminate, distinguish, screen, pigeonhole,
pick over, sort, integrate, blend, inspect, filter, lump, skip, smooth, chunk, average,
approximate, cluster, aggregate, outline, summarize, itemize, review, dip into, flip through,
browse, glance into, leaf through, skim, refine, enumerate, gleam, synopsize, and separate
the sheep from the goats. (50)

Micro/Macro designs enforce both local and global comparisons and, at the same time,
avoid the disruption of context switching. All told, exactly what is needed for reasoning
about information.
High-density design also allow viewers to select, to narrate, to recast and personalize data
for their own uses. Thus control of information is given over to viewers, not to editors
designers, or decorators. (50)

Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information.

The concept that “the simpler the form of a letter the simpler its reading” was an obsession
of beginning constructivism. It became something like a dogma, and is still followed by
“modernistic” typographers.
The notion proved to be wrong, because in reading we do not read letters but words,
words as a whole, as a “word picture”. Ophthalmology has disclosed that the more the
letters are differentiated from each other, the easier is the reading. (51)

3. Layering and Separation

Confusion and clutter failures of design, not attributes of information. And so to point is to
find design strategies that reveal and detail and complexity—rather than to fault the data
for an excess of complication. Or, worse, to fault viewers for a lack of understanding.
Among the most powerful devices for reducing noise and enriching the content of displays
is the technique of layering and separation, visually stratifying various aspects of the data.
Effective layering of information is often difficult; for every excellent performance, a
hundred clunky spaces arise. An omnipresent, yet subtle, design issue is involved: the
various elements collected together on flatland interact , creating non-information patterns
and texture simply through their combined presence. Joseph Albers described this visual
effect as 1 + 1 = 3. (53)
4. Small Multiples

At the heart of quantitative reasoning is a single question: Compared to what?

5. Color and Information

At work in this fine Swiss mountain map are the fundamental uses of color in information
design: to label (color as noun), to measure (color as quantity), to represent or imitate
reality(color as representation), and to enliven or decorate

VISUAL EXPLANATIONS
Eduard R. Tufte

Many of our examples suggest that clarity and excellence in thinking is very much like
clarity and excellence in the display of data. When principles of design replicate principles
of thought, the act of arranging information becomes an act of insight. (9)

..The idea is to make designs that enhance the richness, complexity, resolution,
dimensionality, and clarity of the content. By extending the visual capacities of paper,
video, and computer screen, we are able to extend the depth of our own knowledge and
experience. (9)

Modern scientific graphics were now in place; the two-dimensional plane was quantified,
available for measured data. Used with fitted models, graphics could describe and
characterize relations between variables—thus displaying the essential evidence
necessary for establishing cause and effect. (16)
…More generally, when scientific images become dequantified, the language of analysis
may drift toward credulous descriptions of form, pattern, and configuration—rather than
answers to the questions How many? How often? Where? How much? At what rate?. (23)

Once again Jonson’s Principle: these problems are more than just poor design, for a lack
of visual clarity in arranging evidence is a sign of lack of intellectual clarity in reasoning
about evidence. (48)

…Reliable knowledge grows from evidence that is collected, analyzed, and displayed with
some good comparisons in view. (52)

…Failure to think clearly about the analysis and presentation of evidence opens the door
for all sorts of political and other mischief to operate in making decisions. (52)

: if displays of data are to be truthful and revealing, then the design logic of the display
must reflect the intellectual logic of the analysis:
Visual representations of evidence should be governed by principles of reasoning about
quantitative evidence. For information displays, design reasoning must correspond to
scientific reasoning. Clear and precise seeing becomes as one with clear and precise
thinking. (53)

..Display architecture recapitulates quantitive thinking; design quality grows from

intellectual quality. Such dual principles—both for reasoning about statistical evidence and
for the design of statistical graphics—include (1) documenting the sources and
characteristics of the data, (2) insistently enforcing appropriate comparisons. (3)
demonstrating mechanisms of cause and effect, (4) expressing those mechanisms
quantitatively, (5) recognizing the inherently multivariate nature of analytic problems, and
(6) inspecting and evaluating alternative expressions.

Parallelism connects visual elements. Connections are built among images by position,
orientation, overlap, synchronization, and similarities in context. Parallelism grows from a
common viewpoint that relates like to like. Congruity of structure across multiple images
gives the eye a context for assessing data variation. Parallelism is not simply a matter of
design arrangements, for the perceiving mind itself actively works to detect and indeed to
generate links, clusters, and matches among assorted visual elements. (82)

Multiple images reveal repetition and change, pattern and surprise—the defining elements
in the idea of information. (105)

Multiples amplify, intensify, and reinforce the meaning of images. (b105)

Since many slices of information are displayed within the eyespan, alert viewers may be
able to detect contrasts and correspondences at a glance—uninterrupted visual
reasoning. (112)

Information Visualization: Perception for Design

Colin Ware

Academic Press, San Diego, CA. 2000

Visualization meant constructing a visual image in the mind. But now it has come to
mean something like a graphical representation of data or concepts. From an internal
construct of the mind to an external artifact supporting decision making. (1)

Critical Question
How best to transform the data into something that people can understand for optimal
decision making. (4)

The brain is clearly not an undifferentiated mass; it is more a collection of highly

specialized parallel-processing machines with high-bandwidth interconnections. The entire
system is designed to extract information from the world in which we live, not from some
other environment with entirely different physical properties.

Sensory aspects of visualizations derive their expressive power from being well designed
to stimulate the visual sensory system. In contrast, arbitrary, conventional aspects of
visualization derive their power from how they will be learned.

The distinction between the sensory and social aspects of the symbols used in
visualization also has practical consequences in terms of research methodology. It is not
worth expending a huge effort carrying out intricate and highly focused experiments to
study something that is only this year’s fashion. Howeever, if we can develop
generalizations that apply to large clasases of visual representations, and for a long time,
the effort is worthwhile. (13)

There is an intricate interweaving of learned conventions and hard-wire processing. The

distinction is not as clean as we would like, but there are ways of distinguishing the
different kinds of codes. (14)
Our visual systems are built to perceive the shapes of 3D surfaces.
A sensory code is one for which the meaning is perceived without additional
training.
Sensory immediacy: The processing of certain kinds of sensory information is hard-
wired into the brain... .. the way in which visual systems divides the visual world into
regions is called segmentation. The evidence suggests that this is a function of early rapid-
processing systems. (15)

Cross-cultural validity: a sensory code will in general, be understood across cultural

boundries. (16)

Sensory Research Metholologies

Psychophysics: techniques that are based on applying the methods of physics to
measurements of human sensation... extremely succesful in defining the basic set of limits
of the visual system. (what is the smallest relative brightness change that can be
detected?).
If a psychophysical measurement is highly sensitive to changes in instructions, it is likely
to be measuring something that has higher level cognitive or cultural involment.
Cognitive Psychology: The brain is treated as a set of interlinked processing
modules. (short and long term memory). MRI techniques allow researchers to actually see
which parts of the brain are active when subjects perform certain tasks. (17)

Arbitrary Symbol Research

Anthropoligists, social sciences: They advocate “thick description”. This approach
is based on careful observation, immersion in culture, and an effort to keep ‘the analysis of
social forms closely tied to concrete social events and ocassions” (Cliford Geertz 1973).
Complex user interfaces that they call artifact analysis (Carroll, 1989). In this
approach, user interfaces (and presumably visualization techniques) are best viewed as
artifacts and studied much as an anthropologist studies cultural artifacts of a religious or
practical nature. Formal experiments are out of the question in such circumstances, and if
they were actually carried out, they would change the cultural symbols being studied.
Unfortunately for researchers, sensory and social aspects of symbols are closely
intertwined in many representations. Pure instances of sensory or arbitrary coding may not
exist but doing analysis is not invalid. We must carefully determine which aspects of visual
coding belong in each category. (21)

For the visualization designer, training in art and design is at least useful as training in
perceptual psychology. For those who wish to do good design, the study of design by
example is generally most appropiate. But the science of visualization can inform the
process by providing a scientific basis for design rules, and it can suggest new design
ideas and methods for sipalying data that heve not been thought of before. Ultimately, our
goal should be to create a new set of conventions for information visualization designed to
be optimal based on sound perceptual principles. (21, 22).
Gibson’s Affordance Theory

He assumed that we perceive in order to operate on the environment.

Perception is designed for action. The perceivable possibilities for action he called
Affordances. He claimed that we perceive these properties of the environment in a direct
and immediate way, this theory is clearly attractive from the perspective of visualization,
because the goal of most visualizations is desicion making. Thinking about perception in
terms of action is likely to be much more useful than thinking about how two adjacent
spots of light influence each others appearence (typical approach of classical
psicophysicist). (22)
Instead of reasoning like theorists to first understanding how a single point of light is
perceived and then gradually understanding how two points of light interact and gradually
build to understand the vibrant, dynamic visual world we live in. Gibson took a radically
different approach. He claimed that we do not perceive points of light, we perceive
possibilities for action (affordances) of the environment directly, not indirectly by piecing
together evidence from our senses. To create a good interface, we must create it with
appropiate affordances to make the user’s task easy. ** He rejects the view of the brain
deducing things out about the environment based on available sensory evidence in favor
of the idea that our visual system is tuned to perceiving the visual world and that we
perceive it accurately except under extraordinary circumstances. He preferred to
concentrate on the visual system as a whole and not to break perceptual processing down
into components and operations. He used the term resonating to describe the way visual
system responds to properties of the environment. (23)
*** ejemplo categorias en mi metodo visual

Visualization and Direct Perception: 3 problems

1) Even if perception of the environment is direct, it is clear that visualization of
data through computer graphics is very indirect. There may be many layers of
processing between the data and its representation (abstract data, microscopic
etc. )
2) There are no clear physical affordances in any graphical user interface.

Beyond the visual stages, the visual object identification process interfaces with the verbal
linguistic subsystems of the brain so that words can be connected to images. The
perception-for-action subsytem interfaces with the motor systems that control muscle
movements. (25, 26)

Bertin 1977 Data values and data structures. A more modern way of expressing this idea
is to divide data into entities and relationships.
Entities are the objects we wish to visualize; relations define the structures and
patterns that relate entities to one another. We can also talk about the attributes of
an entity or a relationship. Concepts of entity, relationship and attribute have a long
history in database design and more recently in systems modeling.

Entities & Relationships

Are generally the objects of interest. Relationships can be structural and physical
(a house) or conceptual (store and customers). They may be causal or temporal.
(28).

Attributes of Entities or Relationships (29)

 Attribute is property of some entity and cannot be thought of independently.

Attribute Quality
It is useful to describe data visualization methods in light of the quality of
attributes they are capable of conveying. A useful way of considering the quality of data
is the taxonomy of number scales defined by Stevens 1946.

Nominal.- Labeling function (ruta 100)

Ordinal.- Ordering things in a sequence (best, second best)
Interval.- The gap between data values. (schedules)
Ratio.- We have the full expressive power of a real number ( A as twice as B)

Definiciones

Information visualization is just about that—exploiting the dynamic, interactive, inexpensive

medium of graphical computers to devise new external aids that enhance cognitive
abilities

Visualization: The use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of data to

amplify cognition. (6)
Cognition is the acquisition or use of knowledge. This definition has the virtue of focusing
as much on the purpose of visualization as the means. Hamming (1973) said, “the purpose
of computation is insight, not numbers.” Likewise for visualization, “the purpose of
visualization is insight not pictures.” The main goals of this insight are discovery, decision
making, and explanation. (6)

External cognition is concerned with the interaction of cognitive representations and

processes across the external/internal boundary in order to support thinking. Information
design is the explicit attempt to design external representations to amplify cognition. Data
Graphics is the design of visual but abstract representations of data for this purpose.
Visualization uses the computer for data graphics. Scientific Visualization is visualization
applied to scientific data. The reasons why these two diverge are that scientific data are
often physically based, whereas business information and other abstract data are often
not.

Data Transformation map Raw Data, that is, data in some idiosyncratic format, into Data
Tables, relational descriptions of data extended to include metadata. Visual Mappings
transform Data Tables into Visual Structures, structures that combine spatial substrates,
marks, and graphical properties. Finally, View Transformations create Views of the Visual
Structures by specifying graphical parameters such as position, scaling,, and clipping.
User interaction controls parameters of these transformations, restricting the view to
certain data ranges, for example, or changing the nature of the transformation. The
visualizations and their controls are used in service of some task. (17)

Information visualization is the use of computer-supported interactive visual

representations of abstract data to amplify cognition. Its purpose is not the pictures
themselves, but insight (or rapid information assimilation or monitoring large amounts of
data). Information visualization is a part of the new media made possible by the
development of the real-time visual computer. This medium has promise for five reasons:
 5. It brings increased resources to the human in the form of perceptual
processing and expanded working memory.
6. It can reduce the search for information.
7. It can enhance the recognition patterns.
8. It enables the use of perceptual inference and perceptual monitoring.
The medium itself is manipulable and interactive.

Visualize: (vb) to forma a mental image or vision of....

Visualize: (vb) to imagine or remember as if actually seeing.
Indeed , it results in something rather ephemeral (which we later call a mental model or
internal model), something that cannot be printed out on paper or viewed through a
microscope. The result is, as we say, internal to the human being. The potential value of
visualization—that of gaining insight and understanding—follows from these definitions but
so also, in view of the cognitive nature of visualization does the difficulty of its study. (1)

Visualization meant constructing a visual image in the mind. But now it has come to mean
something like a graphical representation of data or concepts. From an internal construct
of the mind to an external artifact supporting decision making. (1)

Critical Question
How best to transform the data into something that people can understand for optimal
decision making. (4)

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