Three Perceptual Tools for Seeing and Understanding Visualized Data

The visual system evolved and develops to process the scenes, faces, and objects of the natural world, but people adapt this powerful system to process data within an artificial world of visualizations. To extract patterns in data from these artificial displays, viewers appear to use at least three perceptual tools, including a tool that extracts global statistics, one that extracts shapes within the data, and one that produces sentence-like comparisons. A better understanding of the power, limits, and deployment of these tools would lead to better guidelines for designing effective data displays.