Cognitive mapping is what kind of visualization method

Its an experimental moment, when no story fits, and many are tried. But it is not a piercing through of appearances to get to the essence. It is rather a time of new tactical exploits among disorganized appearances. Many attempts at a Marxist theory go wrong by taking the young Lukacs seriously. The great flaw of History and Class Consciousness is his rather comic attempts to make the actual knowledge generated in both manual, technical and scientific labor go away, and to subordinate them to the megalomania of the philosopher as stand in for the party.

For example he faults the Machists for taking the actual resistances and affordances of the material world, as delimited in particular natural sciences, as constraints to which thought and action must attend. The party faulted Lukacs, not so much for a sleight of hand, as for revealing the trick by trying to do it twice. The party had usurped for itself the right to think the totality in the name of the proletariat.

Lukacs tried to double the trick and have the philosopher perform it on behalf of the party. Much of both the beauty of the text and its incoherence comes from this. In Lukacs, the specific labor practices cannot on their own produce knowledge because, fetishism! Rather than think about how specific labors might coordinate among themselves as Bogdanov and other Machists do, or how the party might be the centralized command and control center of such a coordination, Lukacs puts in place of these real problems an imaginary solution: philosophical method.

Those in possession of the right method have the keys to totality. The method alone guarantees the correct assessment of the totality, a vision which has then to be imputed to the proletariat whose thought it is supposed to be. The gap between the actual and imputed class consciousness then becomes an aesthetic problem. At one and the same time the totality is supposed to be opaque to all those poor benighted workers living out their fetishistic fragments.

Yet somehow the philosopher, on behalf of the party, in turn on behalf of the class, somehow has a method that reveals the totality, independent of any specific empirically testable knowledge. This is the problem cognitive mapping inherits from Lukacs: the problem of the opacity of the totality, the faith in a non-empirical method that discerns its essence, and then the role of the aesthetic as a subsidiary service which chisels in stone what theory hath seen on its mountaintop.

Nowhere does it appear that an aesthetic practice might fundamentally alter the concepts. On the aesthetic rather than the theory front, it is tempting to keep dwelling, as generations of old and new leftists did, on the magisterial failures of Vertov and Eisenstein. Both in their own ways reproduce the pathology of a hierarchical view of perception and action in the world. When Hito Steyerl takes the idea of a visual bond from Vertov, it is interesting that it has to become something no longer shot and cut and printed in a centralized fashion.

Here again is something we might borrow from Deleuze and Guattari: the shift in perceptual registers from molar to molecular. Not when that world is made up of global processes that exceed the scales of perception of drama the molar and in both directions.

But one has to take Guattari quite literally when speaking of the molecular: where to hydrocarbons come from? What industrial form does their extraction take?

And — not least — where do the residues of those collective labors end up? If Marx ever had a real intuition of totality, it is not capital , it is metabolic rift. Capital might in large part be the agent, but to see only capital is itself a kind of fetishism. That capital is the fetish of a certain kind of marxocological thinking is made all too clear when it confronts the empirical sciences that point to alarming signs of metabolic rift.

The first act then becomes to rename these signs of the Anthropocene — as the capitalocene! But even if capital were abolished tomorrow, most of the problems grouped under the rubric of the Anthropocene remain and remain ongoing.

Ocean acidification, for example. So while I think Jason Moore is doing very important work under the rubric of the capitalocene, the term ought not to blind us to the larger sense of metabolic rift.

The ruin points to a larger and even less coherent and stable totality. It is probably no longer the case that the city can stand in for the totality, if it ever was. The contemporary city of the over-developed world is in any case a quaint relic. The challenge now would be to cognitively map the megalopolis. How would one make sense of the Pearl River Delta or Mexico City or the vast stretch of human habitation that stretches from Sao Paulo to Brazilia and probably includes one hundred million people?

I really do wish Marxists would stop embarrassing themselves by gesturing against some sort of Platonist approach, where information is all that is real, so as to return to old fashioned 19 th century value theory as if this hand-waving made the problem go away. As I put it in A Hacker Manifesto , information is not form divorced from matter. It is form whose relation to other aspects of matter has become abstract and contingent. This information can be embedded in this material substrate, but could be transferred to another with almost no loss.

In this section, we highlight cases where knowledge either influenced decision making with visualizations or was present but did not influence decisions see Table 6 for the type of knowledge examined in each study. These studies are organized based on how much time the viewers had to incorporate the knowledge i. However, many factors other than time influence the process of transferring knowledge by working memory capacity to long-term knowledge.

Therefore, each of the studies cited in this section could be either Type 1, Type 2, or both types of processing. In a complex geospatial task for which participants made judgments about terrorism threats, participants were more likely to select familiar map-like visualizations rather than ones that would be optimal for the task see Fig. Using the same task and visualizations, Shen et al. In this case, viewers were able to use knowledge-driven processing to improve their performance.

However, Joslyn and LeClerc found that when participants viewed temperature uncertainty, visualized as error bars around a mean temperature prediction, they incorrectly believed that the error bars represented high and low temperatures. Surprisingly, participants maintained this belief despite a key, which detailed the correct way to interpret each temperature forecast see also Boone et al.

Deterministic construal visual-spatial biases may also be one of the sources of misunderstanding of the Cone of Uncertainty Padilla, Ruginski et al. A notable difference between these studies and the work of Shen et al. In contrast, the biases in Joslyn and LeClerc were visual-spatial biases. This provides further evidence that visual-spatial biases may be a unique category of biases that warrant dedicated exploration, as they are harder to influence with knowledge-driven processing. Example of different types of view orientations used by examined by Bailey et al.

Participants selected one of these visualizations and then used their selection to make judgments including identifying safe passageways, determining appropriate locations for firefighters, and identifying suspicious locations based on the height of buildings. Regarding longer-term knowledge, there is substantial evidence that individual differences in knowledge impact decision making with visualizations.

Visual depictions of health data are particularly useful because health data often take the form of probabilities, which are unintuitive.

Visualizations inherently illustrate probabilities i. Further, by depicting natural frequencies visually see example in Fig. This dual benefit is likely the reason visualizations produce facilitation for individuals with less health literacy, graph literacy, and numeracy. Example of stimuli used by Galesic et al.

Participants completed three medical scenario tasks using similar visualizations as depicted here, in which they were asked about the effects of aspirin on risk of stroke or heart attack and about a hypothetical new drug.

Galesic, R. Garcia-Retamero, and G. These studies are good examples of how designers can create visualizations that capitalize on Type 1 processing to help viewers accurately make decisions with complex data even when they lack relevant knowledge.

Based on the reviewed work, we speculate that well-designed visualizations that utilize Type 1 processing to intuitively illustrate task-relevant relationships in the data may be particularly beneficial for individuals with less numeracy and graph literacy, even for simple tasks.

However, poorly designed visualizations that require superfluous mental transformations may be detrimental to the same individuals. Less consistent are findings on how more experienced users incorporate knowledge acquired over longer periods of time to make decisions with visualizations.

Other work finds that experts perform the same as novices Riveiro, , experts can exhibit visual-spatial biases St. This inconsistency may be due in part to the difficulty in identifying when and if more experienced viewers are automatically applying their knowledge or employing working memory. For example, it is unclear if the students in the GIS course documented by Lee and Bednarz developed automatic responses Type 1 or if they learned the information and used working memory capacity to apply their training Type 2.

Cheong et al. In a wildfire task using multiple depictions of uncertainty see Fig. Example of multiple uncertainty visualization techniques for wildfire risk by Cheong et al. Participants were presented with a house location indicated by an X , and asked if they would stay or leave based on one of the wildfire hazard communication techniques shown here.

Some examples of secondary tasks in a dual-task paradigm include span tasks that require participants to remember or follow patterns of information, while completing the primary task, then report the remembered or relevant information from the pattern for a full description of theoretical bases for a dual-task paradigm see Pashler, To our knowledge, only one study has used a dual-task paradigm to evaluate cognitive load of a visualization decision-making task Bandlow et al.

One should expect more interference if the primary and secondary tasks recruit the same processes i. An example of such an experimental design is illustrated in Fig. In the dual-task trial illustrated in Fig. If the task does require significant working memory capacity, then the inclusion of the secondary task should increase the time taken to complete the primary task and potentially produce errors in both the secondary and primary tasks.

In visualization decision-making research, this is an open area of exploration for researchers and designers that are interested in understanding how working memory capacity and a dual-process account of decision making applies to their visualizations and application domains. A diagram of a dual-tasking experiment is shown using the same task as in Fig.

Responses resulting from Type 1 and 2 processing are illustrated. The dual-task trial illustrates how to place additional load on working memory capacity by having the participant perform a demanding secondary task.

The impact of the secondary task is illustrated for both time and accuracy. In sum, this section documents cases where knowledge-driven processing does and does not influence decision making with visualizations. However, the current work does not test how knowledge-driven processing maps on to the dual-process model of decision making.

Knowledge may be held temporally by working memory capacity Type 2 , held in long-term knowledge but strenuously utilized Type 2 , or held in long-term knowledge but automatically applied Type 1. More work is needed to understand if a dual-process account of decision making accurately describes the influence of knowledge-driven processing on decision making with visualizations. Finally, we detailed an example of a dual-task paradigm as one way to evaluate if viewers are employing Type 1 processing.

Throughout this review, we have provided significant direct and indirect evidence that a dual-process account of decision making effectively describes prior findings from numerous domains interested in visualization decision making.

The reviewed work provides support for specific processes in our proposed model including the influences of working memory, bottom-up attention, schema matching, inference processes, and decision making.

Further, we identified key commonalities in the reviewed work relating to Type 1 and Type 2 processing, which we added to our proposed visualization decision-making model. A second cross-domain finding is the introduction of a new concept, visual-spatial biases , which can also be both beneficial and detrimental to decision making. We define this term as a bias that elicits heuristics, which is a direct result of the visual encoding technique. We provide numerous examples of visual-spatial biases across domains for implementation of this model along with Matlab code, see Padilla, Ruginski et al.

The novel utility of identifying visual-spatial biases is that they potentially arise early in the decision-making process during bottom-up attention, thus influencing the entire downstream process, whereas standard heuristics do not exclusively occur at the first stage of decision making.

This possibly accounts for the fact that visual-spatial biases have proven difficult to overcome Belia et al. Work by Tversky presents a taxonomy of visual-spatial communications that are intrinsically related to thought, which are likely the bases for visual-spatial biases.

We have also revealed cross-domain findings involving Type 2 processing, which suggest that if there is a mismatch between the visualization and a decision-making component, working memory is used to perform corrective mental transformations.

The types of mismatches observed in the reviewed literature are likely both domain-specific and domain-general. However, other work demonstrates cases where viewers employ a graph schema that does not match the visualization, which is likely domain-general e.

Feeney et al. In these cases, viewers could accidentally use the wrong graph schema because it appears to match the visualization or they might not have learned a relevant schema. The likelihood of viewers making attribution errors because they do not know the corresponding schema increases when the visualization is less common, such as with uncertainty visualizations.

When there is a mismatch, additional working memory is required resulting in increased time taken to complete the task and in some cases errors e. However, additional empirical research is required to understand the nature of the alignment processes, including the exact method we use to mentally select a schema and the classifications of tasks that match visualizations.

The final cross-domain finding is that knowledge-driven processes can interact or override effects of visualization methods. However, there are also examples of knowledge having little influence on decisions, even when prior knowledge could be used to improve performance Galesic et al.

We point out that prior knowledge seems to have more of an effect on non-visual-spatial biases, such as a familiarity bias Belia et al. Further, it is unclear from the reviewed work when knowledge switches from relying on working memory capacity for application to automatic application.

We argue that Type 1 and 2 processing have unique advantages and disadvantages for visualization decision making. Therefore, it is valuable to understand which process users are applying for specific tasks in order to make visualizations that elicit optimal performance. In the case of experts and long-term knowledge, we propose that one interesting way to test if users are utilizing significant working memory capacity is to employ a dual-task paradigm illustrated in Fig.

A dual-task paradigm can be used to evaluate the amount of working memory required and compare the relative working memory required between competing visualization techniques.

We have also proposed a variety of practical recommendations for visualization designers based on the empirical findings and our cognitive framework.

Below is a summary list of our recommendations along with relevant section numbers for reference:. Work to reduce the number of transformations required in the decision-making process see " Cognitive fit " ;. To understand if a viewer is using Type 1 or 2 processing employ a dual-task paradigm see Fig. Consider evaluating the impact of individual differences such as graphic literacy and numeracy on visualization decision making. We use visual information to inform many important decisions.

To develop visualizations that account for real-life decision making, we must understand how and why we come to conclusions with visual information. We propose a dual-process cognitive framework expanding on visualization comprehension theory that is supported by empirical studies to describe the process of decision making with visualizations. We offer practical recommendations for visualization designers that take into account human decision-making processes.

Finally, we propose a new avenue of research focused on the influence of visual-spatial biases on decision making. The original article Padilla et al. It should be noted that in some cases the activation of Type 2 processing should improve decision accuracy. More research is needed that examines cases where Type 2 could improve decision performance with visualizations. Ancker, J. Design features of graphs in health risk communication: A systematic review. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association , 13 6 , — Article Google Scholar.

Baddeley, A. Working memory. Psychology of Learning and Motivation , 8 , 47— Bailey, K. Geospatial perspective-taking: how well do decision makers choose their views? Balleine, B. The neural basis of choice and decision making. Journal of Neuroscience , 27 31 , — Bandlow, A. Chapter Google Scholar. Belia, S. Researchers misunderstand confidence intervals and standard error bars. Psychological Methods , 10 4 , Bertin, J. Semiology of graphics: Diagrams, networks, maps.

Boone, A. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. An empirical evaluation of three elevation change symbolization methods along routes in bicycle maps. Cartography and Geographic Information Science , 44 5 , — Working memory components and virtual reorientation: A dual-task study. In Working memory: capacity, developments and improvement techniques , pp. Hauppage: Nova Science Publishers. Google Scholar. Card, S. Readings in information visualization: using vision to think.

Castro, S. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Cheong, L. Evaluating the impact of visualization of wildfire hazard upon decision-making under uncertainty. International Journal of Geographical Information Science , 30 7 , — Connor, C. Visual attention: Bottom-up versus top-down. Current Biology , 14 19 , R—R Cowan, N.

The many faces of working memory and short-term storage. Dennis, A. Using geographical information systems for decision making: Extending cognitive fit theory to map-based presentations. Information Systems Research , 9 2 , — Engel, A. Dynamic predictions: Oscillations and synchrony in top—down processing. Nature Reviews Neuroscience , 2 10 , — Engle, R. Individual differences in working memory capacity and what they tell us about controlled attention, general fluid intelligence, and functions of the prefrontal cortex.

Shah Eds. New York: Cambridge University Press. Epstein, S. Individual differences in intuitive—experiential and analytical—rational thinking styles. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 71 2 , Evans, J. Dual-processing accounts of reasoning, judgment, and social cognition. Annual Review of Psychology , 59 , — Dual-process theories of higher cognition: Advancing the debate. Perspectives on Psychological Science , 8 3 , — Fabrikant, S.

Cognitively inspired and perceptually salient graphic displays for efficient spatial inference making. Annals of the Association of American Geographers , 1 , 13— Cognitively plausible information visualization. In Exploring geovisualization , pp. Oxford: Elsevier. Fagerlin, A. Medical Decision Making , 25 4 , — Feeney, A. How people extract information from graphs: Evidence from a sentence-graph verification paradigm.

Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. Frownfelter-Lohrke, C. Journal of Information Systems , 12 2 , 99— Galesic, M. Graph literacy: A cross-cultural comparison. Medical Decision Making , 31 3 , — Using icon arrays to communicate medical risks: Overcoming low numeracy. Health Psychology , 28 2 , Garcia-Retamero, R. Trust in healthcare. In Kattan Ed. Gattis, M. Mapping conceptual to spatial relations in visual reasoning.

PubMed Google Scholar. Gigerenzer, G. Heuristic decision making. Annual Review of Psychology , 62 , — Grounds, M. Probabilistic interval forecasts: An individual differences approach to understanding forecast communication. Advances in Meteorology , , Harel, J. Hegarty, M. The cognitive science of visual-spatial displays: Implications for design. Topics in Cognitive Science , 3 3 , — Thinking about the weather: How display salience and knowledge affect performance in a graphic inference task.

Where are you? The effect of uncertainty and its visual representation on location judgments in GPS-like displays. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied , 22 4 , Choosing and using geospatial displays: Effects of design on performance and metacognition.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied , 18 1 , 1. Hoffrage, U. Using natural frequencies to improve diagnostic inferences. Academic Medicine , 73 5 , — Hollands, J.

Judgments of change and proportion in graphical perception. Huang, Z. Expertise visualization: An implementation and study based on cognitive fit theory. Decision Support Systems , 42 3 , — Itti, L.

A model of saliency-based visual attention for rapid scene analysis. Joslyn, S. Decisions with uncertainty: The glass half full. Current Directions in Psychological Science , 22 4 , — Kahneman, D.

Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Representativeness revisited: Attribute substitution in intuitive judgment. In Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment , p. Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases , 1st ed. Book Google Scholar. Kane, M. A controlled-attention view of working-memory capacity.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General , 2 , Keehner, M. Different clues from different views: The role of image format in public perceptions of neuroimaging results. Keller, C. Effect of risk ladder format on risk perception in high-and low-numerate individuals. Risk Analysis , 29 9 , — Keren, G.

Two is not always better than one: A critical evaluation of two-system theories. Perspectives on Psychological Science , 4 6 , — Kinkeldey, C. Evaluating the effect of visually represented geodata uncertainty on decision-making: Systematic review, lessons learned, and recommendations.

Cartography and Geographic Information Science , 44 1 , 1— How to assess visual communication of uncertainty? A systematic review of geospatial uncertainty visualisation user studies. The Cartographic Journal , 51 4 , — Kriz, S. Top-down and bottom-up influences on learning from animations. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies , 65 11 , — Kunz, V. Rational choice. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag.

Lallanilla, M. Lee, J. Effect of GIS learning on spatial thinking. Journal of Geography in Higher Education , 33 2 , — Liu, L. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics, 23 9 , Lobben, A.

Tasks, strategies, and cognitive processes associated with navigational map reading: A review perspective. The Professional Geographer , 56 2 , — Lohse, G. A cognitive model for understanding graphical perception. Human Computer Interaction , 8 4 , — The role of working memory on graphical information processing. Marewski, J.

Heuristic decision making in medicine. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience , 14 1 , 77— McCabe, D. Seeing is believing: The effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning. Cognition , 1 , — McKenzie, G. Assessing the effectiveness of different visualizations for judgments of positional uncertainty. International Journal of Geographical Information Science , 30 2 , — It helps to have the in-room notetaker also be responsible for the setup of the technology and any technology-driven logistics between sessions.

This approach frees the primary facilitator to focus on making the participant feel comfortable and on creating the cognitive map. Introduce yourself. Begin the opening by introducing yourself and stating the purpose of the research. For example,. This is my colleague Maria, who will be taking notes throughout our session. Thank you for taking the time to join us today. The purpose of our research is to learn more about how companies are organizing their design teams.

We are really interested in your experience working as a design leader. We would like your honest answers. There is no wrong way of doing things. Introduce the method. Nothing is off limits and you can use any of the materials you like. Do what you feel most comfortable with. Do you have any questions for us before we begin? Ask an initial trigger question.

Prepare an initial warm-up question to start the conversation. It should be easy to answer an open-ended — for example, a free-association question:. Think out loud and write each word on a separate sticky.

Go ahead and do this. If so, do you mind showing us by drawing it? What makes up [read term on sticky]. It is helpful to prepare some topics and probing questions ahead of time to use as needed. However, due to the unstructured nature of the interview, the sequence of the topics will vary from interview to interview. Pivot through your topic list using phrases like:. Is there anything else you want to include? Give time for the participant to add any last thoughts.

Aside from physical cues like placing new stickies in front of them as they think aloud or turning to a new sheet of paper as the current one gets too crowded , you may want to offer additional verbal prompts until they are comfortable drawing or writing on their own:. Can you show me on your map? Give the participant time to wrap up their closing thoughts or ideas.

What did you think about the method we used?