Visual Thinking Lab

We study visual thinking: how it works, and how education + design can make it work better.


About

We study how leveraging the visual system - the largest single system in your brain - can help people think, remember, and communicate more efficiently. Our basic research is inspired by real-world problems, guiding our laboratory toward the most interesting basic research questions, while producing results that translate directly to science, education, business, & design.

News

Data Visualization

Visual Attention

Visual Structure

Education


Data Visualizations support visual analysis and communciation of patterns in data. We study how to make them more powerful and understandable.


Word Clouds are more effective when arranged into visually distinct semantic groups. [More]

Visualizations as Ambiguous figures: See video of Steve's presentation from OpenVis 2018 [More]

Redundant Encoding can help people see groups of data more clearly [More]

Multiclass scatterplots: How to color them to see clusters of points as distinct [More]

Ensemble coding supports rapid extraction of visual statistics. [More]

The connected scatterplot connects scatterplot points with a line in a temporal sequence. [More]

ISOTYPE Visualization: There are no user costs - and some intriguing benefits - when pictographs are used to represent the data. [More]

Staggered animated transitions have negligible or negative impact on tracking datapoints over time [More]

Best visualizations for precise perception of correlation. [More]