activity
20192023
most citedTruncating the Y-Axis: Threat or Menace?

51 citations · 87 across the 11 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

12 papers

cs.HC2023

The Arrangement of Marks Impacts Afforded Messages: Ordering, Partitioning, Spacing, and Coloring in Bar Charts

Racquel Fygenson, Steven Franconeri, Enrico Bertini

Data visualizations present a massive number of potential messages to an observer. One might notice that one group's average is larger than another's, or that a difference in value…

cs.HC2023★ 6 cited

Average Estimates in Line Graphs Are Biased Toward Areas of Higher Variability

Dominik Moritz, Lace M. Padilla, Francis Nguyen +1

We investigate variability overweighting, a previously undocumented bias in line graphs, where estimates of average value are biased toward areas of higher variability in that line…

cs.HC2022★ 1 cited

Seeing What You Believe or Believing What You See? Belief Biases Correlation Estimation

Cindy Xiong, Chase Stokes, Yea-Seul Kim +1

When an analyst or scientist has a belief about how the world works, their thinking can be biased in favor of that belief. Therefore, one bedrock principle of science is to minimiz…

cs.GR2021

Jurassic Mark: Inattentional Blindness for a Datasaurus Reveals that Visualizations are Explored, not Seen

Tal Boger, Steven B. Most, Steven L. Franconeri

Graphs effectively communicate data because they capitalize on the visual system's ability to rapidly extract patterns. Yet, this pattern extraction does not occur in a single glan…

cs.HC2021★ 5 cited

Visual Arrangements of Bar Charts Influence Comparisons in Viewer Takeaways

Cindy Xiong, Vidya Setlur, Benjamin Bach +3

Well-designed data visualizations can lead to more powerful and intuitive processing by a viewer. To help a viewer intuitively compare values to quickly generate key takeaways, vis…

cs.HC2021

Rethinking the Ranks of Visual Channels

Caitlyn M. McColeman, Fumeng Yang, Steven Franconeri +1

Data can be visually represented using visual channels like position, length or luminance. An existing ranking of these visual channels is based on how accurately participants coul…

cs.HC2020★ 21 cited

Truth or Square: Aspect Ratio Biases Recall of Position Encodings

Cristina R. Ceja, Caitlyn M. McColeman, Cindy Xiong +1

Bar charts are among the most frequently used visualizations, in part because their position encoding leads them to convey data values precisely. Yet reproductions of single bars o…

cs.HC2020

How to evaluate data visualizations across different levels of understanding

Alyxander Burns, Cindy Xiong, Steven Franconeri +2

Understanding a visualization is a multi-level process. A reader must extract and extrapolate from numeric facts, understand how those facts apply to both the context of the data a…

cs.HC2020

Why Shouldn't All Charts Be Scatter Plots? Beyond Precision-Driven Visualizations

Enrico Bertini, Michael Correll, Steven Franconeri

A central concept in information visualization research and practice is the notion of visual variable effectiveness, or the perceptual precision at which values are decoded given v…

cs.HC2019★ 2 cited

Illusion of Causality in Visualized Data

Cindy Xiong, Joel Shapiro, Jessica Hullman +1

Students who eat breakfast more frequently tend to have a higher grade point average. From this data, many people might confidently state that a before-school breakfast program wou…

cs.HC2019★ 1 cited

Biased Average Position Estimates in Line and Bar Graphs: Underestimation, Overestimation, and Perceptual Pull

Cindy Xiong, Cristina R. Ceja, Casimir J. H. Ludwig +1

In visual depictions of data, position (i.e., the vertical height of a line or a bar) is believed to be the most precise way to encode information compared to other encodings (e.g.…

cs.HC2019★ 51 cited

Truncating the Y-Axis: Threat or Menace?

Michael Correll, Enrico Bertini, Steven Franconeri

Bar charts with y-axes that don't begin at zero can visually exaggerate effect sizes. However, advice for whether or not to truncate the y-axis can be equivocal for other visualiza…