Insights from Neuroscience: Exploring Highly Sensitive Persons’ Use of Knowledge Visualization

About one fourth of humans (and animals) have a highly sensitive brain: they attend and process visual stimuli with more intensity. Brain scans show that highly sensitive individuals have greater activation of neural regions involved with higher-order visual processing. It has been theorized that highly sensitive people are more creative and can benefit more from structuring information into knowledge maps compared to text. We investigate this proposition by conducting a qualitative explorative analysis of artifacts created by subjects attending a course based on design thinking. We find that highly sensitive individuals used more colors, and created visual metaphors more often compared to individuals who do not have this temperament trait. Less sensitive people created linear diagrams more often compared to highly sensitive individuals. These promising preliminary findings seem to indicate the need for visualization studies to include sensitivity as a potential important moderator of visualization effectiveness.