Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa BarbaraSchool of Psychology, University of Dundee, ScotlandDepartment of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Cogn Sci. 2008 Oct;32(7):1099-132. doi: 10.1080/03640210801898177.
Three experiments examined the effects of interactive visualizations and spatial abilities on a task requiring participants to infer and draw cross sections of a three-dimensional (3D) object. The experiments manipulated whether participants could interactively control a virtual 3D visualization of the object while performing the task, and compared participants who were allowed interactive control of the visualization to those who were not allowed control. In Experiment 1, interactivity produced better performance than passive viewing, but the advantage of interactivity disappeared in Experiment 2 when visual input for the two conditions in a yoked design was equalized. In Experiments 2 and 3, differences in how interactive participants manipulated the visualization were large and related to performance. In Experiment 3, non-interactive participants who watched optimal movements of the display performed as well as interactive participants who manipulated the visualization effectively and better than interactive participants who manipulated the visualization ineffectively. Spatial ability made an independent contribution to performance on the spatial reasoning task, but did not predict patterns of interactive behavior. These experiments indicate that providing participants with active control of a computer visualization does not necessarily enhance task performance, whereas seeing the most task-relevant information does, and this is true regardless of whether the task-relevant information is obtained actively or passively.
三个实验考察了交互可视化和空间能力对一项需要参与者推断和绘制三维（3D）物体横截面的任务的影响。实验操纵了参与者在执行任务时是否可以交互式控制物体的虚拟 3D 可视化，并且将允许交互式控制可视化的参与者与不允许控制的参与者进行了比较。在实验 1 中，交互性比被动观察产生了更好的性能，但在实验 2 中，当配对设计中两种条件的视觉输入相等时，交互性的优势消失了。在实验 2 和 3 中，交互参与者操纵可视化的方式的差异很大，并且与性能相关。在实验 3 中，观看显示最佳运动的非交互参与者的表现与有效操纵可视化的交互参与者一样好，并且比无效操纵可视化的交互参与者更好。空间能力对空间推理任务的表现有独立的贡献，但不能预测交互行为的模式。这些实验表明，为参与者提供对计算机可视化的主动控制不一定会增强任务表现，而看到最相关的任务信息则会增强，无论任务相关信息是主动还是被动获得的，都是如此。
