Cognitive Effects of Animated Visualization in Exploratory Visual Data Analysis

The goal of this research is to study the role and effects of the use of animated information visualization in early stages of exploratory data analysis tasks. Despite the existence of a large body of research on information visualization, there has been little known regarding how and when one should use and how to interact with animated visualization to help exploring data. By animated visualization, we mean a type of information visualization technique that produces autonomous motions of representations. This research has explored the issue from two aspects: what cognitive effects animated information visualization has, and what interactions people would have with animated visualization when exploring data. We have conducted two user studies to investigate each aspect, and identified research challenges for designing an interactive animated information visualization environment that supports early stages of exploratory data analysis. These findings help us further study how to extend the notions developed in the spatial visualization to the temporal visualization; for instance, what Focus+Context means when applied to the time dimension in animated visualization.