Cognitive Daily
Category: Attention • Reasoning • Research Posted on: January 28, 2009 4:43 PM, by Dave Munger
Take a look at this graph showing population distribution by county in a fictional U.S. state:
ratwani1.p
ng ResearchBlogging.org
How do you read such a graph? Is this the ideal way to depict this sort of information? If you wanted to know which part of the state was most populous, how would you go about figuring it out? Researchers have developed conflicting models to explain how it's done. One model suggests that people reading this kind of graph must cycle between the different parts in order to understand it. This makes some sense: to answer our question about population, you'd have to look back and forth between the legend and the colors on the map.
read the full article
at Cognitive Daily
Reading Graphs: How we do it, and what it tells us about making better ones
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