Encoding and Representation of Information in Auditory Graphs: Descriptive Reports of Listener Strategies for Understanding Data

While a growing wealth of data have offered insights into the best practices for auditory display design and application, little is known about how listeners internally represent and use the information presented in auditory displays. At the conclusion of three separate studies, participants responded to an open-ended question about the strategies they used to perform auditory graphing tasks. We report a descriptive analysis of these qualitative responses. Participants’ comments were coded by two raters along a number of dimensions that were chosen to represent a comprehensive set of encoding and task strategy possibilities. These descriptive analyses suggest that auditory graph listeners use a variety of strategies to cognitively represent the data in the display. Furthermore, these qualitative data offer a number of insights and questions for future research on information representation for auditory displays.