Professional Differences: A Comparative Study of Visualization Task Performance and Spatial Ability Across Disciplines
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Problem-driven visualization work is rooted in deeply understanding the data, actors, processes, and workflows of a target domain. However, an individual's personality traits and cognitive abilities may also influence visualization use. Diverse user needs and abilities raise natural questions for specificity in visualization design: Could individuals from different domains exhibit performance differences when using visualizations? Are any systematic variations related to their cognitive abilities? This study bridges domain-specific perspectives on visualization design with those provided by cognition and perception. We measure variations in visualization task performance across chemistry, computer science, and education, and relate these differences to variations in spatial ability. We conducted an online study with over 60 domain experts consisting of tasks related to pie charts, isocontour plots, and 3D scatterplots, and grounded by a well-documented spatial ability test. Task performance (correctness) varied with profession across more complex visualizations (isocontour plots and scatterplots), but not pie charts, a comparatively common visualization. We found that correctness correlates with spatial ability, and the professions differ in terms of spatial ability. These results indicate that domains differ not only in the specifics of their data and tasks, but also in terms of how effectively their constituent members engage with visualizations and their cognitive traits. Analyzing participants' confidence and strategy comments suggests that focusing on performance neglects important nuances, such as differing approaches to engage with even common visualizations and potential skill transference. Our findings offer a fresh perspective on discipline-specific visualization with specific recommendations to help guide visualization design that celebrates the uniqueness of the disciplines and individuals we seek to serve.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it