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Visual Task Performance and Spatial Abilities: An Investigation of Artists and Mathematicians

Published: 19 April 2023 Publication History

Abstract

This study builds on past research to present a domain-specific empirical investigation of artists and math & computer scientists on their respective relationships to, perceptions of, and interactions with data visualization. We conducted a three-phase study utilizing mixed-methods to investigate performance on visual and text representations of data between domains. Our findings evidenced how math & computer scientists are proficient utilizing text representations of data while artists benefit more from visual chart representations. Finally, we present perspectives from artists to gain an understanding of their approach to visual and mathematical tasks. Our findings indicate that artists are especially adept at statistical visual tasks and that development of cognitive skills could be fostered by individuals to potentially benefit visualization task performance.

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        CHI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
        April 2023
        14911 pages
        ISBN:9781450394215
        DOI:10.1145/3544548
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        Published: 19 April 2023

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        1. Human-subjects quantitative studies
        2. bar charts
        3. cognitive abilities
        4. domain-specific
        5. education
        6. mixed-methods
        7. perception
        8. spatial ability
        9. text representation
        10. visual artists

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