Perceptual and Cognitive Foundations of Information Visualization.

Information visualization has practical value – it is a means to gain insights, reveal patterns, shape decision-making and provoke a reaction from the reader. However, current evaluation methods are conceived in terms of the transmission of information, rather than use of visualization in practice. This has resulted in a divergence between the factors known to be important in practice (such as engagement and the reader's visual literacy), and the factors considered in the formulation of visualization design guidance. Even for the relatively simple case of static visualization, a new theoretical contribution is needed to describe the interaction between visualization design choices and the reader's prior knowledge.In this research, a semiotics approach was used to extend the theory of visualization semantics, with the aim of developing an understanding of the context-specific meaning of visual features. The term semantic scaffolding is used in this thesis to describe the capacity for features in a visualization take on additional meaning when read in a specific context.The first part of the thesis concerns the use of visual conventions and figurative images (e.g. illustrations) to convey meaning in information visualization. Content analysis of visualization exemplars examined whether the reader's prior knowledge is anticipated in information visualization practice. The analysis investigated the prevalence of visual conventions and figurative images in data visualizations and infographics. The content analysis showed that figurative elements and conventions are commonly used in exemplars of visualization practice. Visual conventions anticipate the readersʹ familiarity with the prior meaning of visual features. Figurative images convey descriptive information by anticipating the reader's knowledge of and ability to recognise the visual forms of objects.Both figurative images and visual conventions are currently undervalued within the information visualization research community, because the way they contribute to meaning does not fit information transmission conceptualizations of visualization. By extending concepts from geospatial visualization, this research constructed a critical vocabulary for the descriptive information conveyed by figurative images. The critical vocabulary for figurative images articulates the increased expressive capabilities of information visualization layouts which use both figurative and abstract representation ('hybrid' information visualizations).For the second part of the thesis, a new conceptual model was developed through the synthesis of existing models and experiments on visualization construction and interpretation. The new conceptual model developed in this project – called the semantic scaffolding model – assigns a specific role to the reader’s prior knowledge in creating practical value. It is premised on the co-construction of meaning through visual encoding and the reader's context-specific knowledge (semantic scaffolding). Motifs, or intermediate level visual features (groups of marks or mark attributes encoding multiple data values), are a key component of the semantic scaffolding model. Motifs are created indirectly through the transformation of data into a visual form, but can be perceived as unitary visual forms with a coherent, context-specific meaning. Both intermediate level motifs and information-rich figurative images are visual features which can have practical meaning for the reader beyond the meaning encoded by the data-to-visual transformation.The semantic scaffolding model and associated research is important in providing a technical language and set of concepts which can shape future research in the field of information visualization. To prevent a widening rift between information visualization research and practice, the design of experiments, evaluation measures and heuristics needs to shift away from the current focus on the encoded meaning of individual visual values. Instead, research needs to be designed around visual features and their practical meaning for the reader.

This study proposes and implements an exhibition design project on the theme of “Let the Earth Warm Up at Most 1.5℃”, which is centered on the issue of global climate change. By integrating visualization design, spatial display and science communication, the project aims to present the global warming trend triggered by greenhouse gas emissions and its multiple impacts on the ecosystem in a visual and tangible way. The exhibition is based on the HadCRUT Global Surface Temperature Dataset (1860-2020), which is a multi-dimensional graphic based on scientific evidence, reflecting the trend of global average annual temperature change since the Industrial Revolution.The design covers a number of ecological tipping points in the context of climate warming, such as the melting of the Greenland ice cap, the degradation of the Amazon rainforest, the reduction of Arctic sea ice and the demise of coral reefs, etc. Through screen installations, multimedia interactions and information on display panels, it simulates the temperature rise scenarios and their chain of impacts on biodiversity. Among them, the “sensible” design is reflected in the integration of visual, auditory and tactile dimensions, such as the visualization interface, real-time feedback temperature measurement paper material and temperature rise simulation device, etc., so that the audience can perceive the real consequences of climate change in an immersive environment.At the same time, the exhibition extends to supporting design elements such as exhibition tickets, cultural and creative packaging, and the use of eco-friendly materials to stimulate audience engagement and emotional resonance.“Public Participation” is reflected through sustainable education modules and interactive feedback mechanisms, such as “Future Commitment Card” and “I will do something to reduce carbon emissions for the Earth”, which will guide the audience to the project's design logic is based on the concept of “Climate Action”.The design logic of this project is based on the path of “scientific fact - visual interpretation - public participation”, exploring the role of design in environmental communication and climate action. Through the construction of an interactive environmental education field, the project promotes the audience's understanding and emotional resonance of climate change issues, and highlights the potential and responsibility of design as a communication medium in social sustainability issues.

By studying the contents, culture, characteristics, functions, information, definition and visual design methods of the visual interface of the infographic, the thinking construction of the visualization of the infographic is constructed. The visual design of infographic is to express certain culture, things, states, data and phenomena through content interpretation, visual illustration, table analysis and thinking cognition, and then highlight visual features with abstract or concrete thinking cognition and concept elaboration. The visual interface design of infographic has the advantage of visual expression for some abstract thinking such as time, culture and space, which is easier to be interpreted by the public than text and language. As an interdisciplinary subject, information graphic visual interface design reflects the diversified development of data information, science and technology, information blending and thinking evolution.KeywordsInfographicVisualizationThinkingInteractive

Vision and Locomotion Combine to Drive Path Integration Sequences in Mouse Retrosplenial Cortex.

The role of perspective in event segmentation

В статье рассмотрены основные вопросы развития пространственно-образного мышления бакалавров. Исследованы основы пространственно-проблемного восприятия учебной информации обучающимися высших образовательных учреждений в ходе учебного процесса. Раскрыты особенности графикации и графической визуализации учебной информации. Обосновывается картографический подход и его роль в формировании пространственного, образного мышления обучающихся. Рассмотрена графикация как образно-знаковый язык работы с информацией в целом и учебной информацией в частности. Подробно разобрано содержание приведенного метода, включающее уровни специальной и профессиональной подготовки. Каждый уровень, в свою очередь, состоит из блоков, включающих в себя постепенно усложняющиеся во времени конкретные элементы обучения. Раскрыт понятийный аппарат инфокартографического метода, изучены условия его реализации, область применения, а также эффективность применения данного метода при профессиональной подготовке обучающихся (на примере подготовки бакалавров по направлению «Туризм»). В статье приводится разработка системы уровней формирования графикационных умений. Каждому из трех уровней соответствует определенный набор умений, являющийся базой для следующего уровня. На первичном, начальном, уровне основными графическими умениями являются построение элементов графического образа, изображение вербального высказывания в виде графемы и т. п. Следующий, деятельностный, или вербально-графический, уровень, подразумевает наличие более широкого спектра умений в области визуализации статистической информации, вербальной (текстовой) информации (текста): логическое структурирование текста, подбор графического образа, построение графемы. И финальный, научно-поисковый, уровень предполагает такие умения, как построение и интерпретация графем различных типов, визуализация информации в профессиональной деятельности, создание логико-графических моделей, презентаций, туристских карт, т. е. информационно-картографическую компетентность в целом. The article deals with the main issues of the development of spatial-visual thinking of bachelors. The basics of spatial-problem perception of educational information by students of higher educational institutions during the educational process are investigated. The features of graphication and graphic visualization of educational information are revealed. The cartographic approach and its role in the formation of spatial, imaginative thinking of students are substantiated. The infocartographic method is considered as a specific language for working with information in general and educational information in particular. The content of the given method, including the levels of special and professional training, is analyzed in detail. Each level, in turn, consists of blocks that include specific learning elements that gradually become more complex over time. The conceptual apparatus of the infocartographic method is disclosed, the conditions of its implementation, the scope of application, as well as the effectiveness of this method in the professional training of students (on the example of training bachelors in the direction of “Tourism”) are studied. The article also provides the development of a system of levels of formation of organizational skills. Each of the three levels corresponds to a certain set of skills, which is the basis for the next level. At the primary, initial level, the main graphic skills are the construction of elements of a graphic image, the image of a verbal utterance in the form of a grapheme, etc. The next, activity or verbal-graphic level, implies the presence of a wider range of skills in the field of visualization of statistical information, verbal (text) information (text): logical structuring of the text, selection of a graphic image, construction of a grapheme. And the final, scientific and search level, involves such skills as the construction and interpretation of graphemes of various types, visualization of information in professional activities, the creation of logical and graphical models, presentations, tourist maps,- information and cartographic competence in general.

Information visualization design is closely related to statistics, computer science, visual image design and other scientific fields and professions, and is used to provide the public with epidemic prevention and health information during the epidemic. Relevant data and information are provided by health, industry and information technology, transportation, customs, immigration management, civil aviation, railway, etc. The purpose is to analyze various information visualization cases for public health emergencies and how to convey information to the public. We analyze how to deal with the three user elements of user participation subject, user cognitive psychology and user interaction behavior in the excellent information visualization design cases. Combined with the above analysis, the development of the epidemic situation can be presented in a rich and intuitive way, so that the public can understand the transmission route of the epidemic and the number of cases, and the public will have less panic about it. At the same time, the correlation between data should be mined to help the audience to establish an effective logical thinking in the face of massive information. Moreover, attention should also be paid to the different ways of information visualization to bring different psychological feelings to the viewers. Through these three approaches, the effect of information visualization in public security emergencies in the era of big data can be improved, and the information of public health emergencies can be more accurately and dynamically controlled, which is conducive to improving the ability of relevant organizations to predict and respond to public health emergencies.KeywordsPublic health security emergenciesInformation visualizationEpidemics

This article develops a method to automatically discover and quantify human-interpretable visual characteristics directly from product image data. The method is generative and can create new visual designs spanning the space of visual characteristics. It builds on disentanglement methods in deep learning using variational autoencoders, which aim to discover underlying statistically independent and interpretable visual characteristics of an object. The impossibility theorem in the deep learning literature indicates that supervision with ground truth characteristics would be required to obtain unique disentangled representations. However, these are typically unknown in real-world applications, and are in fact exactly the characteristics that need to be discovered. Extant machine learning methods are unsuitable since they require ground truth labels for each visual characteristic. In contrast, this method postulates the use of readily available product characteristics (such as brand and price) as proxy supervisory signals to enable disentanglement. This method discovers and quantifies human-interpretable and statistically independent characteristics without any specific domain knowledge on the product category. It is applied to a dataset of watches to automatically discover interpretable visual product characteristics, obtain consumer preferences over visual designs, and generate new ideal point designs targeted to specific consumer segments.

Decision letter: Visual and motor signatures of locomotion dynamically shape a population code for feature detection in Drosophila

Neuroscientific studies have revealed that alpha oscillations in electroencephalography (EEG) signals play an active role in the cognitive aspects of human daily life. In this paper, we developed an artificial encoding model to mimic the dynamic brain visual processing system in terms of alpha oscillations. We analyzed the induced alpha power during free viewing of natural videos and extracted relevant features in a participant-independent way. Meanwhile, the visual characteristics that would trigger involuntary attention in the early stage of visual processing were extracted from videos and further employed to estimate the alpha fluctuations at every 0.5 s. We compared the encoding performances across 19 electrode channel locations and selected an optimal encoding model with a support vector regression. The results demonstrated a promising brain encoding model in EEG signals, that could further contribute to the development of brain-computer interface and visual design.

User experience remains a crucial consideration when assessing the successfulness of information visualization systems. The theory of affordances provides a robust framework for user experience design. In this article, we demonstrate a design case that employs an affordance-based framework and evaluate the information visualization display design. SolarWheels is an interactive information visualization designed for large display walls in computer network control rooms to help cybersecurity analysts become aware of network status and emerging issues. Given the critical nature of this context, the status and performance of a computer network must be precisely monitored and remedied in real time. In this study, we consider various aspects of affordances in order to amplify the user experience via visualization and interaction design. SolarWheels visualizes the multilayer multidimensional computer network issues with a series of integrated circular visualizations inspired by the metaphor of the solar system. To amplify user interaction and experience, the system provides a three-zone physical interaction that allows multiple users to interact with the system. Users can read details at different levels depending on their distance from the display. An expert evaluation study, based on a four-layer affordance framework, was conducted to assess and improve the interactive visualization design.

Semantic classification of urban scenes aims to classify scenes composed of many different types of objects into predefined semantic classes. To learn the association between urban scenes and semantic classes, five tasks are needed: 1) segmenting the image into scenes; 2) establishing semantic classes of scenes; 3) extracting and transforming features; 4) measuring the intrascenes feature similarity; and 5) labeling each scene by a semantic classification method. Despite many efforts on these tasks, most existing works consider only visual features with inconsistent similarity measurement, while ignore semantic features inside scenes and the interactions between scenes, leading to poor classification results for high heterogeneous scenes. To solve these problems, this study combines intrascene feature similarity and interscene semantic dependency to form a two-step classification approach. For the first step, visual and semantic features are first optimized to be invariant to affine transformation, and then are employed in K-Nearest Neighbor to initially classify scenes. For the second step, multinomial distribution is presented to model both the spatial and semantic dependency between scenes, and then used to improve the initial classification results. The implementations conducted in two study areas indicate that the proposed approach produces better results for heterogeneous scenes than visual interpretation, as it can discover and model the hidden information between scenes which is often ignored by existing methods. In addition, compared with the initial classification, the optimized step improves accuracies by 3.6% and 5% in the two study areas, respectively.

The progress of science and technology and the rapid development of the Internet have made the visual communication design full of unprecedented yearning and passion for the new scientific and technological civilization. This research mainly discusses the visual communication design under 5G technology. For the fifth generation mobile communication technology (5G), its brand new network architecture design can provide 10 to 20 times higher peak rate, millisecond-level network transmission delay, and 100 billion device-level network connectivity than 4G. It will open up a new era of extensive interconnection of all things and deep human-computer interaction for human society. This paper starts with the relationship between visual communication and various media, so as to prove that the development of mobile media will be inevitable, especially in environment, the visual expression and the innovation in design style. In order to reflect the inner will of the audience in the environment of rapid development of information, this article. It analyzes the changes brought by the development of mobile media to the visual communication design at this stage, predicts the development trend of visual communication, and tries to point out that the development of 5G communication technology is bringing a new round of revolution to the design industry. As a design researcher, it should pay attention to the impact of technological changes on the design field. By exploring suitable design methods, the application of visual communication in mobile media under 5G technology conditions can be better realized. Starting from the background of the evolution and development of media, this paper analyzes the reasons for the rise of 5G technology, as well as the characteristics of 5G technology and its advantages in communication. At the same time, it deeply analyzes the connotation and involved fields of visual communication design and expounds the promotion and influence of the reform of media technology. It focuses on analyzing the development level of 5G technology and the new thinking brought by visual communication design. The article also puts forward the origin of the research. 58.1% of the evaluators were satisfied with the impact of 5G technology on visual communication. Visual design, interaction design, and usability design are all indispensable factors in interface design. When designing, they are not designed in isolation from each other but interact with each other. When carrying out any one of the designs, the design influence of the other two should be combined, and the changes of each one should affect the design of the other two. For example, interaction design and usability issues must be considered when determining the visual presentation of an interface. It can be seen that the design process of the interface is a comprehensive design process. This research helps to advance the development of visual communication design in the future.

The digitalization of medical human-machine system equips data with an essential role during processes supported by digital information systems. Here, data and information visualizations are able to reduce complexity only if influencing variables on human understanding, insight, and decision-making can be controlled, quantified and ergonomically designed. Present chapter provides an review on previous work in computer sciences, engineering, psychology and medicine in order to descriptively summarize human aspects which are relevant for the design of data and information visualizations in healthcare settings. The second part of this chapter builds upon the outcome of this review by working out current challenges of information and data visualization for consumer healthcare systems and introducing three studies which serves to tackle those challenges.

In the modern environment, visual communication design has become a comprehensive subject that combines technology and art. The development of various technologies has promoted the emergence of new design art forms, and at the same time, it has also promoted the change of design concepts and thinking modes. Visual representation, as a representation practice to express the meaning of information in the form of visual symbols, is a method and means to realize information visualization. Based on visual interface design, this article takes interactivity and user experience as innovation points and digs into the design process of interactive information visualization to achieve the purpose of information transmission. By analyzing the cognitive tasks of users in each stage of visual thinking activities in visual terminals, this article proposes to optimize the interactive design of visual communication from the key points of attention, consciousness, and memory. In order to verify the feasibility of the interactive mode of visual communication based on information visualization theory, this article has carried out several comparative experiments with different models. Experimental results show that this algorithm has a faster convergence speed and a greater generalization ability, the accuracy of the algorithm reaches 96.03%, and the highest evaluation of user satisfaction is 95.93%. The interactive mode of visual communication in this article can provide means and reference value for the development direction of visual communication design.