This research focuses on the factors that influence the interpretation of scatter plots. It investigates how common visual aspects of scatter plots, such as outliers and trend lines, along with cognitive biases, affect the perception of correlation trends. The paper finds that outliers skew trend perception, trend lines enhance the perceived strength of trends and mitigate the influence of some outliers, and cognitive biases have a minor influence on the perception of weak correlations. The study proposes guidelines to adjust visual elements to reduce the distortion in scatter plot interpretation and explores their application to other types of visualizations.
Publication date: 26 Oct 2023
Project Page: Not provided
Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.15406
