Looking at the Representations in our Mind: Measuring Mental Models of Information Visualizations

Abstract

Users of information visualization systems build up internal representations of the displayed information and the system --mental models -- and constantly update them during interaction with the system. Though this theoretical approach was postulated as promising for information visualization, measures for empirical studies are missing. In this paper, we present different measures and evaluation procedures that have been developed for the assessment of mental models in other domains and discuss their suitability for the evaluation of internal and external representations in information visualization.