A Survey of Perception-Based Visualization Studies by Task
This survey addresses the lack of a comprehensive guide for researchers and practitioners in visualization to contextualize and apply perception principles, though it is incremental as it synthesizes existing work.
The authors conducted a systematic review of perception-based visualization studies since 1980, summarizing research developments by low-level tasks, visual encoding, and visualization type to provide a comprehensive guide for the visualization community.
Knowledge of human perception has long been incorporated into visualizations to enhance their quality and effectiveness. The last decade, in particular, has shown an increase in perception-based visualization research studies. With all of this recent progress, the visualization community lacks a comprehensive guide to contextualize their results. In this report, we provide a systematic and comprehensive review of research studies on perception related to visualization. This survey reviews perception-focused visualization studies since 1980 and summarizes their research developments focusing on low-level tasks, further breaking techniques down by visual encoding and visualization type. In particular, we focus on how perception is used to evaluate the effectiveness of visualizations, to help readers understand and apply the principles of perception of their visualization designs through a task-optimized approach. We concluded our report with a summary of the weaknesses and open research questions in the area.