The document discusses visual perception and how information is processed. It covers topics like cognition, cognitive science, learning styles, sensation and perception, visual memory, gestalt principles, and limits of short-term memory. Examples are provided to illustrate concepts like preattentive attributes, chunking, and how visualization can take advantage of human perception to effectively communicate data and patterns.

1. data & content design
Frieda Brioschi - frieda.brioschi@gmail.com
Emma Tracanella - emma.tracanella@gmail.com
HOW WE PERCEIVE INFORMATION
LESSON 7 - 20120

2. WITH YOUR DATA PROJECT
LET’S START

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LESSON 6
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UPDATES ON YOUR PROJECT
Photo by William Iven on Unsplash

4. PAST
A LESSON FROM THE

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LESSON 7
BULLET HOLES ON PLANES
During World War II, researchers from the
Center for Naval Analyses had conducted
a study of the damage done to aircraft that
had returned from missions, and had
recommended that armor be added to the
areas that showed the most damage (red
dots).
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LESSON 7
A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE
But Abraham Wald, a mathematician, came to
a different conclusion: the red dots only
represented the damage on planes that came
home.
The holes in the returning aircraft, then,
represented areas where a bomber could take
damage and still return home safely.
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Wald proposed that the Navy reinforce areas where the returning
aircraft were unscathed, since those were the areas that, if hit, would
cause the plane to be lost.

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LESSON 7
THE SURVIVORSHIP BIAS
It's the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past
some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of
their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways.
(Wikipedia)
In our story, it’s when everyone considered what survived instead of focusing on
the ones that didn’t.
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8. INFORMATION
PERCEIVING AND PROCESSING

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THE MENTAL ACTION OR PROCESS OF ACQUIRING
KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING THROUGH
THOUGHT, EXPERIENCE, AND THE SENSES.
- lexico.com
LESSON 7
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LESSON 7
COGNITION
It encompasses many aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as
attention, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment
and evaluation, reasoning and "computation", problem solving and decision
making, comprehension and production of language.
Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and generate new knowledge.
(Wikipedia)
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LESSON 7
COGNITIVE SCIENCE
According to George Miller, fields that
contributed to the birth of cognitive
science, includ linguistics, neuroscience,
artificial intelligence, philosophy,
anthropology, and psychology.
▸ Img by Charles Lowe, CC-BY-SA
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LESSON 7
HOW WE LEARN
How we process information and experiences (what we do with new information and
experiences) varies along a continuum from “reflective observation” to “active
experimentation.” We process our experiences by reflecting about them, filtering new
learning through our experiences. Then we process new learning by acting on it, by trying
things out.
The combination of how we perceive and process information and experiences forms our
unique learning style.
▸ https://fyi.extension.wisc.edu/wateroutreach/water-outreach-education/what-are-beps/knowledge-
area-beps-2/learning-styles-introduction/learning-styles-perceiving-and-processing-information/
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LESSON 7
LEARNING STYLES
We perceive and process information and experiences in different ways.
We perceive something new through our senses (direct experience), and then we
use our cognitive abilities to identify the new thing (abstract conceptualization).
This movement along the “perceiving” dimension is related to the “processing”
dimension.
People are equipped with senses that help us to take in the world around us. Our
senses have the ability to convert real-world information into electrical information
that can be processed by the brain. The way we interpret this information is what
leads to our experiences of the world.
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LESSON 7
SENSATION AND PERCEPTION
The physical process during which our sensory organs—those involved with
hearing and taste, for example—respond to external stimuli is called sensation.
After our brain receives the electrical signals, we make sense of all this
stimulation and begin to appreciate the complex world around us. This
psychological process—making sense of the stimuli—is called perception.
▸ https://nobaproject.com/modules/sensation-and-perception
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LESSON 7
EXPERIENCE MATTERS
It is clear that our experience influences how our brain processes things.
Your past experience has changed the way you perceive the writing in the triangle!
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LESSON 7
ELLEMME FOR IGPDECAUX @PORTA GARIBALDI
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LESSON 7
HUMAN FIELD OF VISION
17Img by Zyxwv99, CC-BY-SA

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LESSON 7
VISUAL PERCEPTION
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Visual perception is important because most information that we receive is
conveyed visually.
How do we read or pick up information from complex visual stimuli?
We do it by jumping our eye around to pick up different parts of the image that
we're looking at, because we can only really get detailed information from the
central part of the field of view.
So in order to see all the different parts we have to jump around, through
multiple eye fixations to pick up the information.

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LESSON 7
..AND YOU?
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LESSON 7
GOLDEN RULES
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▸ Make important information visible ("Did users actually see the information
that I was trying to present to them or did they miss it entirely?”)
▸ Information that is not immediately visible and perceivable by readers, is
less likely to be noticed ("Did people ever actually see the information that
you are trying to present to them?”)
▸ https://www.coursera.org/lecture/introtoux-principles-and-processes/visual-perception-part-1-v7dlk

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LESSON 7
KOLB'S EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING
21https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolb's_experiential_learning

22. VISUALIZATION
TOWARDS DATA
Photo by ev on Unsplash

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LESSON 7
BASICS
▸ Visual perception is selective. We selectively pay attention to
things that catch our attention.
▸ Our eyes are drawn to familiar patterns. Visualization must take
into account what people know and expect.
▸ Our working memory is very limited.
▸ daydreamingnumbers.com/blog/visual-perception-data-visualization/
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Visual memory is a form of memory which preserves some characteristics of our
senses pertaining to visual experience.
The iconic and working memories are the ones that interact with visualizations
LESSON 7
VISUAL MEMORY
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LESSON 7
ICONIC AND WORKING
▸ Iconic: when we see the information remains in the iconic memory for a tiny
period of time; during it we process and store information automatically. This
process is called preattentive processing and it happens automatically, even
before we pay attention to the information. The preattentive process detects
several visual attributes.
▸ Working: The sensory information that is of interest to us is processed in the
working memory. The capacity of our working memory is between 5 to 9 similar
items (Miller’s Law: seven, plus or minus two). This capacity can be increased
by chunking, that is grouping similar items together.
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LESSON 7
CHUNKING
Data visualizations take advantage of chunking. When information is displayed in
the form of visuals that show meaningful patterns, more information can be chunked
together. Hence, when we look at a visual, we can process a great deal more
information than what we can when looking at the data in the form of a table.
For a visualization to be effective, we need to pay attention to not providing more
data than what our brains can process. It is also important to display the visual on a
screen or a single location, such that we can see it without having to scroll or
bounce back and forth between multiple locations.
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LESSON 7
GESTALT PRINCIPLES
Gestalt theory is based on the idea that the human brain will attempt to simplify and
organize complex images or designs that consist of many elements, by
subconsciously arranging the parts into an organized system that creates a whole,
rather than just a series of disparate elements.
There are six individual principles commonly associated with gestalt theory:
similarity, continuation, closure, proximity, figure/ground, and symmetry & order.
▸ https://www.toptal.com/designers/ui/gestalt-principles-of-design
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LESSON 7
SIMILARITY
Objects that share similar attributes (e.g., color or shape) are perceived as a group.
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The squares here are all
equally spaced and the same
size, but we automatically
group them by color, even
though there's no rhyme or
reason to their placement.

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LESSON 7
PROXIMITY
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Objects that are close together are perceived as a group.

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LESSON 7
CLOSURE
Open structures are perceived as closed, complete, and regular whenever there is a
way that they can be reasonably interpreted as such.
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The brain completes the
white shapes, even
though they're not well
defined.

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LESSON 7
CONTINUITY
Objects that are aligned together or appear to be a continuation of one another are
perceived as a group.
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The eye tends to want to
follow the straight line from
one end of this figure to the
other, and the curved line
from the top to the bottom,
even when the lines change
color midway through.

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LESSON 7
ENCLOSURE
Objects that appear to have a boundary around them (e.g., formed by a line or area
of common color) are perceived as a group.
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Faces or a vase?

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LESSON 7
CONNECTION
Objects that are connected (e.g., by a line) are perceived as a group.
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LESSON 7
TEMPERATURE ANOMALIES BY COUNTRY
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhbdyNnUliM

35. PERCEPTION
VISUAL

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THE DEGREE TO WHICH YOUR DATA
PRESENTATION EFFECTIVELY AND EFFICIENTLY
COMMUNICATES DEPENDS ON HOW WELL YOU
TAP INTO THE POWER OF VISUAL PERCEPTION
- Stephen Few
LESSON 7
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LESSON 7
VISUAL SYSTEM
The visual system has its own rules. We can easily see patterns
presented in certain ways, but if they are presented in other ways,
they become invisible. [..]
If we can understand how perception works, our knowledge can be
translated into rules for displaying information. Following perception-
based rules, we can present our data in such a way that the important
and informative patterns stand out. If we disobey these rules, our data
will be incomprehensible or misleading.
▸ https://books.google.it/books/about/Information_Visualization.html?id=qFmS95vf6H8C&redir_esc=y
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LESSON 7
LIMITS OF SHORT-TERM MEMORY
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▸ http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/ie/visual_perception.pdf

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LESSON 7
COUNT HOW MANY TIMES THE NUMBER "5" APPEARS
(Attentive processing -> serial)
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LESSON 7
COUNT HOW MANY TIMES THE NUMBER "5" APPEARS
(Preattentive perception -> parallel)
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LESSON 7
PREATTENTIVE ATTRIBUTES: FORM
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LESSON 7
PREATTENTIVE ATTRIBUTES: COLOR & POSITION
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LESSON 7
HOW TO USE THEM
Best visualizations allow users to see what designer want them to see
before they know that they have seen it.
Orientation Vs Hue
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44. PERCEPTION
REPRESENTATION AND
Photo by ev on Unsplash

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LESSON 7
YOUR BIRTHDAY DATA
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7/24/1997
4/25/1998
7/5/1996
7/17/1999
2/14/1998
7/20/1998
6/10/1998
5/13/1997
4/15/2019
5/8/1996
5/27/1994
2/10/1999
1/9/1997
9/5/1995
1/23/1998
3/24/1998
2/22/2019
3/28/1998
9/7/1999
11/6/1996
7/7/1998
5/8/1996

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LESSON 6
YOUR BIRTHDAY DATA - YEAR
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LESSON 7
YOUR BIRTHDAY DATA - DAY & MONTH
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