Ziemkiewicz Caroline, Kosara Robert
UNC Charlotte.
IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph. 2008 Nov-Dec;14(6):1269-76. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2008.171.
The nature of an information visualization can be considered to lie in the visual metaphors it uses to structure information. The process of understanding a visualization therefore involves an interaction between these external visual metaphors and the user's internal knowledge representations. To investigate this claim, we conducted an experiment to test the effects of visual metaphor and verbal metaphor on the understanding of tree visualizations. Participants answered simple data comprehension questions while viewing either a treemap or a node-link diagram. Questions were worded to reflect a verbal metaphor that was either compatible or incompatible with the visualization a participant was using. The results (based on correctness and response time) suggest that the visual metaphor indeed affects how a user derives information from a visualization. Additionally, we found that the degree to which a user is affected by the metaphor is strongly correlated with the user's ability to answer task questions correctly. These findings are a first step towards illuminating how visual metaphors shape user understanding, and have significant implications for the evaluation, application, and theory of visualization.
信息可视化的本质可被认为在于其用于构建信息的视觉隐喻。因此，理解可视化的过程涉及这些外部视觉隐喻与用户内部知识表征之间的相互作用。为了研究这一说法，我们进行了一项实验，以测试视觉隐喻和语言隐喻对树形可视化理解的影响。参与者在查看树形图或节点链接图时回答简单的数据理解问题。问题的措辞反映了与参与者正在使用的可视化兼容或不兼容的语言隐喻。结果（基于正确性和响应时间）表明，视觉隐喻确实会影响用户从可视化中获取信息的方式。此外，我们发现用户受隐喻影响的程度与用户正确回答任务问题的能力密切相关。这些发现是朝着阐明视觉隐喻如何塑造用户理解迈出的第一步，对可视化的评估、应用和理论具有重要意义。
