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Visualizing Uncertainty in Different Domains: Commonalities and Potential Impacts on Human Decision-Making

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Visualization Psychology

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Abstract

Visualizing uncertainty is a difficult but important task. Many techniques for visualizing uncertainty are designed for a specific domain, such as cartography or scientific visualization, and the effectiveness of these techniques is tested within that domain (when it is tested at all). This makes it difficult to generalize the findings to other tasks and domains. Recent work in visualization psychology has begun to focus on this problem from the perspective of how different visualization techniques impact human cognitive processes, including perception, memory, and decision-making. Taking this perspective allows researchers to develop theories that can generalize across domains. This is a rich area for research, but given the large number of papers about uncertainty visualization, it can be difficult to know where to begin. The goal of this chapter is to provide a broad overview of what kinds of uncertainty visualization techniques have been developed in different domains, which ones have been evaluated with respect to their impact on human cognition, and where important gaps remain.

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Acknowledgements

This chapter describes objective technical results and analysis. Any subjective views or opinions that might be expressed in the paper do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Energy or the United States Government. This work was funded by Sandia National Laboratories’ Laboratory-Directed Research and Development program. Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.

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  1. Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM, USA

    Laura E. Matzen, Alisa Rogers & Breannan Howell

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  1. Laura E. Matzen
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  2. Alisa Rogers
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  3. Breannan Howell
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Correspondence to Laura E. Matzen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Danielle Albers Szafir

  2. Department of Computer Science, King's College London, London, UK

    Rita Borgo

  3. OeRC, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Min Chen

  4. Department of Public Health, Swansea University, Swansea, UK

    Darren J. Edwards

  5. School of Interactive Arts & Technology, Simon Fraser University, Surrey, BC, Canada

    Brian Fisher

  6. Northeastern University, Boston, USA

    Lace Padilla

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Matzen, L.E., Rogers, A., Howell, B. (2023). Visualizing Uncertainty in Different Domains: Commonalities and Potential Impacts on Human Decision-Making. In: Albers Szafir, D., Borgo, R., Chen, M., Edwards, D.J., Fisher, B., Padilla, L. (eds) Visualization Psychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34738-2_14

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