Jurassic Mark: Inattentional Blindness for a Datasaurus Reveals that Visualizations are Explored, not Seen

Abstract

Graphs effectively communicate data because they capitalize on the visual system’s ability to rapidly extract patterns. Yet, this pattern extraction does not occur in a single glance. Instead, research on visual attention suggests that the visual system iteratively applies a sequence of filtering operations on an image, extracting patterns from subsets of visual information over time, while selectively inhibiting other information at each of these moments. To demonstrate that this powerful series of filtering operations also occurs during the perception of visualized data, we designed a task where participants made judgments from one class of marks on a scatterplot, presumably incentivizing them to relatively ignore other classes of marks. Participants consistently missed a conspicuous dinosaur in the ignored collection of marks (93% for a 1s presentation, and 61% for 2.5s), but not in a control condition where the incentive to ignore that collection was removed (25% for a 1s presentation, and 11% for 2.5s), revealing that data visualizations are not “seen” in a single glance, and instead require an active process of exploration.