The Role of Relevance and Cognition in Attention-guiding Geovisualisation

Abstract

It is a delicate task to design suitable geovisualisations that allow users an efficient visual processing of the depicted geographic information. Today, such a design task is subject to three major challenges: the ever growing amount of geospatial data at various levels of detail, the diversified applications of that data, and the continuously expanding range of display sizes. In this work, the aim was to enhance the visualisation of relevant geographic information by focusing on utility and usability issues of designing geographic information representations. The relevance of information as an element of utility and its cognitively adequate visualisation as an element of usability was considered. To enhance utility, irrelevant data was separated from relevant data by implementing relevance as a filter and embodying relevance values as attributes of the selected objects. To represent these relevant objects and the context information design principles were formulated and a design methodology proposed that tends to facilitate a user's attentional capacities when processing geovisualisations. In order to design this attention-guiding geovisualisation, use was made of approaches and findings from relevance theory and cognitive psychology with emphasis on neuroscientific principles. A combination of relevance filtering and a cognitively adequate visualisation improved the overall usefulness of geovisualisations and made a substantial contribution to their practical acceptability. This interdisciplinary approach allowed a more precise and valid evaluation of geovisualisation designs.

An Exploratory Study Investigating Gender Effects on Using 3D Maps for Spatial Orientation in Wayfinding

“…One key objective in designing the 3D map is to ensure effective and efficient transmission of cartographic information to users. Swienty et al [35] proposed a general framework for geovisualization called "attention-guiding geovisualization". Its basic principles are to: (1) design task-relevant objects that are perceptually salient; (2) make less relevant objects less attractive; and (3) omit irrelevant objects [35].…”

“…Swienty et al [35] proposed a general framework for geovisualization called "attention-guiding geovisualization". Its basic principles are to: (1) design task-relevant objects that are perceptually salient; (2) make less relevant objects less attractive; and (3) omit irrelevant objects [35]. Based on a controlled eye-tracking experiment, Fabrikant et al [36] further demonstrated that perceptually salient designs can contribute to efficient spatial inference making for novice users when interpreting weather maps.…”

“…The 2D base map design process generally followed conventional map design processes and principles [41]. The key principle in designing the map was to render task-relevant features perceptually more salient and reduce redundant information while retaining adequate information for wayfinding on the selected route [35]. For example, to achieve conciseness and reduce visual complexity, labels (street names and building names) and features that were far from the route were considered irrelevant and were thus excluded from the map.…”

“…It is important to note that these models depend solely on bottom-up features and do not consider top-down factors such as user tasks and previous knowledge [43]. Such computational visual attention models are used to evaluate the visual saliency of map designs and have been commonly used in cartography studies [35,36,44,45]. We adopted the widely used Itti model developed by Itti et al [46] to compute saliency maps.…”

“…Finally, visual layers were hierarchically organized into regions, roads, the route, labels, and 3D landmarks [35]. An oblique view was adopted.…”