An experimental analysis of three methods for highlighting colorful pictographic symbols

摘要

Highlighting is one of the key functionalities of any interactive visualization environment. Yet, there is little research on highlighting methods. This article focuses on highlighting of colorful pictographic symbols. Three strategies for highlighting were tested by implementing three highlighting methods that were suggested suitable in the literature on attention, perceptual grouping, and motion detection. An experimental design measuring response times and accuracy was used and subjective opinions were collected. The three available strategies for applying the highlighting effect to a subset of visually salient (i.e., colorful) symbols are: (1) to decrease the saliency of the non-highlighted symbols, (2) to increase the saliency of the highlighted symbols, and (3) to add a connecting element for grouping the highlighted symbols. Of these strategies, adding a connecting element was found to be the least efficient based on the response times, whereas both methods for tuning the saliency difference between the highlighted and non-highlighted symbols were found to be equally efficient. However, decreasing the saliency of the non-highlighted symbols was clearly preferred in the subjective evaluation.