Existing research suggests that individual personality differences are correlated with a user's speed and accuracy in solving problems with different types of complex visualization systems. In this paper, we extend this research by isolating factors in personality traits as well as in the visualizations that could have contributed to the observed correlation. We focus on a personality trait known as "locus of control," which represents a person's tendency to see themselves as controlled by or in control of external events. To isolate variables of the visualization design, we control extraneous factors such as color, interaction, and labeling, and specifically focus on the overall layout style of the visualizations. We conduct a user study with four visualizations that gradually shift from an indentation metaphor to a containment metaphor and compare the participants' speed, accuracy, and preference with their locus of control. Our findings demonstrate that there is indeed a correlation between the two: participants with an internal locus of control perform more poorly with visualizations that employ a containment metaphor, while those with an external locus of control perform well with such visualizations. We discuss a possible explanation for this relationship based in cognitive psychology and propose that these results can be used to better understand how people use visualizations and how to adapt visual analytics design to an individual user's needs.

Abstract-Existing research suggests that individual personality differences are correlated with a user's speed and accuracy in solving problems with different types of complex visualization systems. We extend this research by isolating factors in personality traits as well as in the visualizations that could have contributed to the observed correlation. We focus on a personality trait known as "locus of control" (LOC), which represents a person's tendency to see themselves as controlled by or in control of external events. To isolate variables of the visualization design, we control extraneous factors such as color, interaction, and labeling. We conduct a user study with four visualizations that gradually shift from a list metaphor to a containment metaphor and compare the participants' speed, accuracy, and preference with their locus of control and other personality factors. Our findings demonstrate that there is indeed a correlation between the two: participants with an internal locus of control perform more poorly with visualizations that employ a containment metaphor, while those with an external locus of control perform well with such visualizations. These results provide evidence for the externalization theory of visualization. Finally, we propose applications of these findings to adaptive visual analytics and visualization evaluation.

A major obstacle in photography is the presence of distracting elements that pull attention away from the main subject and clutter the composition. In this article, we present a new image-processing technique that reduces the salience of distracting regions. It is motivated by computational models of attention that predict that texture variation influences bottom-up attention mechanisms. Our method reduces the spatial variation of texture using power maps, high-order features describing local frequency content in an image. We show how modification of power maps results in powerful image de-emphasis. We validate our results using a user search experiment and eye tracking data.

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