Inoculating students against misleading data visualizations with perceptual training and informative feedback

Abstract

Misleading visualizations are a form of misinformation that distort data interpretation, leading to misunderstandings and poor decision-making. Despite their prevalence in both traditional and digital media, there is limited research on effective educational interventions that help students recognize and resist such deceptive visualization techniques. In this study, we developed a perceptual training intervention specifically designed to inoculate students against misleading visualizations. Unlike traditional perceptual trainings that typically involve only correct visuals, trainings for misleading visualizations require the inclusion of erroneous visual examples. While the informative feedback can help students to efficiently recognize such misleading visualizations and extract correct information, it may also disrupt the inductive learning during training, potentially reducing its overall effectiveness. To shed light into these possibilities, we investigated the role of informative feedback in a perceptual training designed for misleading visualizations. We conducted two experiments with large samples of undergraduate students (Experiment 1: N = 252, Experiment 2: N = 244). Experiment 1 tested the short-term effects of different informative feedback types during perceptual training, while Experiment 2 examined both the long-term retention (after one month) and near transfer to novel misleading visualizations. Results showed that informative feedback significantly improved students’ accuracy and efficiency in detecting misleading features within visualizations. Students also transferred these skills to novel misleading visualization types, and critically the benefits of informative feedback were sustained over a month. These results highlight the potential of perceptual trainings with informative feedback to inoculate students against misleading visualizations, offering valuable guidance for the development of educational interventions aimed at mitigating the effects of visual misinformation.