Attending to and Maintaining Hierarchical Objects in Graphics Comprehension

Abstract

Abstract. Information graphics convey different levels of information, depending on how their elements are grouped into different units of objects. How people set boundaries to graphical objects to be interpreted and how they maintain the object boundaries during the given task are two important problems in understanding the way people comprehend information graphics. Table comprehension process was experimentally investigated in terms of eye gaze control behaviors when people were required to read off information distributed over multiple cells, e.g., a row or a column, of an alphanumerical table. Eye movement asymmetry was observed between vertical and horizontal integration of information. It was also observed that both grid lines orthogonal to the direction of integration and larger inter-cell spacings increase the number of corrective eye movements. We provide an explication of these observations applying recent findings about object-based attention and visual indexing. We emphasize the significance of embodied pictures on human graphics comprehension supported by close interactions between perceptual and cognitive processes.