Existing toolkits for analyzing movement dynamics in animal ecology primarily focus on individual or group behavior in habitats without predefined boundaries, while methods for studying human activity often cater to bounded environments, such as team sports played on defined fields. This leaves a gap in tools for modeling and analyzing human group…

In contexts where people lack prior knowledge and risk awareness--such as the COVID-19 pandemic--even truthful visualizations of data can seem surprising. This can lead people to mistrust the veracity of the data and to discount it, leading to poor risk decisions. In this work, we illustrate how narrative visualizations can achieve a balance…

Previous work has demonstrated similarities and differences between aerial and terrestrial image viewing. Aerial scene categorization, a pivotal visual processing task for gathering geoinformation, heavily depends on rotation-invariant information. Aerial image-centered research has revealed effects of low-level features on performance of various…

With ubiquitous computing, problems can be solved using more strategies than ever, though many strategies feature subpar performance. Here, we explored whether and how simple advice regarding when to use which strategy can improve performance. Specifically, we presented unfamiliar alphanumeric equations (e.g., A + 5 = F) and asked whether counting…

In visual communication, people glean insights about patterns of data by observing visual representations of datasets. Colormap data visualizations ("colormaps") show patterns in datasets by mapping variations in color to variations in magnitude. When people interpret colormaps, they have expectations about how colors map to magnitude,…

In co-located, multi-user settings such as multi-touch tables, user interfaces need to be accessible from multiple viewpoints. In this project, we investigated how this goal can be achieved for depictions of data in bar graphs. We designed a laboratory task in which participants answered simple questions based on information depicted in bar graphs…

People are inundated with popular press reports about medical research concerning what is healthy, get advice from doctors, and hear personal anecdotes. How do people integrate conflicting anecdotal and statistical information when making medical decisions? In four experiments (N = 4126), we tested how people use conflicting information to judge…

Evidence-based algorithms can improve both lay and professional judgements and decisions, yet they remain underutilised. Research on advice taking established that humans tend to discount advice--especially when it contradicts their own judgement ("egocentric advice discounting")--but this can be mitigated by knowledge about the…

How do scientists generate and weight candidate queries for hypothesis testing, and how does learning from observations or experimental data impact query selection? Field sciences offer a compelling context to ask these questions because query selection and adaptation involves consideration of the spatiotemporal arrangement of data, and therefore…