Assessing the cognition of movement trajectory visualizations: interpreting speed and direction

ABSTRACT

This paper evaluates cognitively plausible geovisualization techniques for mapping movement data. With the widespread increase in the availability and quality of space-time data capturing movement trajectories of individuals, meaningful representations are needed to properly visualize and communicate trajectory data and complex movement patterns using geographic displays. Many visualization and visual analytics approaches have been proposed to map movement trajectories (e.g. space-time paths, animations, trajectory lines, etc.). However, little is known about how effective these complex visualizations are in capturing important aspects of movement data. Given the complexity of movement data which involves space, time, and context dimensions, it is essential to evaluate the communicative efficiency and efficacy of various visualization forms in helping people understand movement data. This study assesses the effectiveness of static and dynamic movement displays as well as visual variables in communicating movement parameters along trajectories, such as speed and direction. To do so, a web-based survey is conducted to evaluate the understanding of movement visualizations by a nonspecialist audience. This and future studies contribute fundamental insights into the cognition of movement visualizations and inspire new methods for the empirical evaluation of geovisualizations.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognitive evaluation
• user evaluation
• spatial cognition
• movement visualization
• movement trajectories
• cartography

Acknowledgment

The authors gratefully acknowledge the funding support from the National Science Foundation (Award # BCS–1853681). We appreciate Kyle Johnson’s assistance as a Research Assistant on the project in creating the initial visualizations used for the study and Teresa Gonzalez's assistance as a Research Assistant working on data analysis. We are grateful to the anonymous participants for helping us to conduct this study. We thank the two reviewers for their thorough feedback which has greatly improved the quality of the paper, and thank Research Assistants Micayla Roth and Sean Won for their assistance with revisions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Author contributions

This research was conceived and led by SD as the PI. CB and SD designed the study and wrote the paper collaboratively. CB conducted the experiments, analyzed the results, and prepared figures.

Data availability statement

The figures that support the findings of this study are available for viewing at https://doi.org/10.25349/D9BC9V.

Additional information

Funding

The main funding source for this research is National Science Foundation Award # BCS–1853681: Visualizing Motion: A Framework for the Cartography of Movement.