Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Data visualizations are powerful tools for communicating quantitative information. While prior work has focused on how experts design informative graphs, little is known about the intuitions non-experts have about what makes a graph effective for communicating a specific message. In the current study, we asked participants (N=398) which of eight graphs would be most useful for answering a particular question, where all graphs were generated from the same dataset but varied in how the data were arranged. We tested the degree to which participants based their decisions on sensitivity to how easily other participants (N=542) would be able to answer that question with that graph. Our results suggest that while people were biased towards graphs that were at least minimally informative (i.e., contained the relevant variables), their decisions did not necessarily reflect sensitivity to more graded but systematic variation in actual graph comprehensibility.