"Thinking with visualizations, fast and slow"
Steven Franconeri
Professor of Psychology
PI, Visual Thinking Laboratory
Northwestern University
Monday, April 8, 2019
12 PM - 1:30 PM
Robinson 107
316 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Event Page
Abstract: Your visual system evolved and develops to process the scenes, faces, and objects of the natural world. You then adapt that system to process the artificial world of graphs, maps, and data visualizations.
This adaptation can lead alternatively to fast and powerful – or deeply slow and inefficient – visual processing. I’ll use interactive visual tasks to demonstrate the powerful capacity limits that arise when we extract structure and meaning from these artificial
displays, which I will argue must occur via a slow serial language-like representation. Understanding these constraints leads to guidelines for display design and instruction techniques, across information dashboards, slide presentations, and STEM Education.
About the speaker: Steven Franconeri is a Professor of Psychology at Northwestern (Weinberg College), with courtesy appointments in Marketing (Kellogg School
of Business) and Design (McCormick School of Engineering), and he serves as Director of the Northwestern Cognitive Science Program. His research is on visual thinking, visual communication, decision making, and the psychology of data visualization. Franconeri
directs the Visual Thinking Laboratory, where a team of researchers explore how leveraging the visual system – the largest single system in your brain – can help people think, remember, and communicate more efficiently. The laboratory’s basic research questions
are inspired by real-world problems, providing perspective for new and existing theories, while producing results that translate directly to science, education, design, and business.
About NUVis: The Northeastern
University Visualization Consortium (NUVis) is an interdisciplinary cross-university initiative to support the university’s research efforts in visualization and to connect faculty, researchers, and students across campus to foster a visualization community.
Northeastern University’s interdisciplinary focus and structure is an ideal environment for such an interdisciplinary field of study, and the goal of NUVis, funded through a collaboration between the College of Arts, Media and Design and the Khoury College
of Computer Sciences, is to continue to foster and grow this important area of research. NUVis sponsors talks and symposia including a bi-weekly seminar, connects faculty and students through its online portal, provides resources to support visualization-related
research at the university through avenues including workshops and library-sponsored open office hours, and hosts and organizes community building events including hackathons and student research poster exhibitions.