Why We Remember Some Visualizations and Forget Others

By Tiffany Trader

November 1, 2013

Researchers from Harvard and MIT have teamed up to address an important question: what makes a data visualization memorable? The conventional opinion is that it’s easy to identify “bad” data visualization: tacky renderings with too much text, excessive ornamentation, distracting colors, and kitschy clip art.

Top twelve most memorable visualizations from the experiment (Image courtesy of Michelle Borkin, Harvard SEAS.)
Design expert Edward Tufte refers to these pieces as “chart junk” classifying them as redundant at best, and useless at worst. The visualization community, however, is divided. Some say these seemingly extraneous elements actually serve a purpose by creating a lasting impression in the viewer’s mind.

The debate over “chart junk” became the impetus for a scientific study, which was then documented in a research paper by computer scientists at Harvard and cognitive scientists at MIT. These experts of design call into question the usefulness of a perfectly-executed graphic that hardly anyone remembers. They conclude that the very design elements that attract so much criticism can also make a visualization more memorable.

The authors write that “knowing what makes a visualization memorable is a step towards answering higher level questions like ‘What makes a visualization engaging’ or ‘What makes a visualization effective?'”

Results of this study were presented on October 15 at the IEEE Information Visualization (InfoVis) conference in Atlanta, Georgia. The work was also highlighted on Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences website.

For lead author Michelle Borkin, a doctoral student at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), memorability is a key metric. “I spend a lot of my time reading these scientific papers, so I have to wonder, when I walk away from my desk, what am I going to remember?” she says. “Which of the figures and visualizations in these publications are going to stick with me?”

Borkin and her team performed the largest-scale visualization study of its kind, collecting 5,693 visualizations, categorized by visualization type (e.g., bar chart, line graph, etc.), from news media sites, government reports, scientific journals, and infographic sources. After eliminating multiple images (i.e., ones that were grouped rather than stand-alone) the initial pool was winnowed to 2,070 single-panel visualizations. A further subset of 410 images were selected as “target” visualizations. Each of these was annotated with additional attributes, including ratings for data-ink ratios and visual densities.

The experiment was set up as a game on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which compensates participants, called workers, for performing HITs (“Human Intelligence Task”). Workers were presented with a sequence of images and asked to press a key if they saw an image for the second time in the sequence. At the end of the testing, each image was given a memorability score. What the researchers discovered was that observers are consistent in which visualizations are most memorable and which are most forgettable.

Out of the 410 target images, 145 contained either photographs or cartoons, humanly recognizable objects, which the scientists refer to as pictograms. The study showed that visualizations that used pictograms had on average higher memorability scores.

Borkin’s adviser, Hanspeter Pfister, a Wang Professor of Computer Science at Harvard SEAS, adds this commentary: “A visualization will be instantly and overwhelmingly more memorable if it incorporates an image of a human-recognizable object – if it includes a photograph, people, cartoons, logos – any component that is not just an abstract data visualization,” she says. “We learned that any time you have a graphic with one of those components, that’s the most dominant thing that affects the memorability.”

Visualizations that were more dense or used more color also had higher memorability scores, but other results proved a bit more surprising:

“You’d think the types of charts you’d remember best are the ones you learned in school – the bar charts, pie charts, scatter plots, and so on,” Borkin says. “But it was the opposite.” Charts with more unusual shapes – tree diagrams, network diagrams, grid matrices and such – were actually more memorable.

Audra Oliva, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, has been studying visual memory for about six years now. Research performed by her team demonstrates that human memory responds better to human-centric images rather than landscapes.

Without this similarity across human responses, asking what makes an image or visualization more memorable than another would be pointless.

“All of us are sensitive to the same kinds of images, and we forget the same kind as well,” Oliva says. “We like to believe our memories are unique, that they’re like the soul of a person, but in certain situations it’s as if we have the same algorithm in our heads that is going to be sensitive to a particular type of image. So when you find a result like this in photographs, you want to know: is it generalizable to many types of materials – words, sound, images, graphs?”

The scientists who performed the study are excited about the potential for advancing the science of visualization, but they are also quick to point out that memorability is just one parameter. Accuracy is always the highest priority with the best visualizations also being easy to comprehend, engaging and aesthetically-pleasing. But there’s no reason they can’t also be memorable.

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

Nvidia Appoints Andy Grant as EMEA Director of Supercomputing, Higher Education, and AI

March 22, 2024

Nvidia recently appointed Andy Grant as Director, Supercomputing, Higher Education, and AI for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). With over 25 years of high-performance computing (HPC) experience, Grant brings a Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Houston We Have a Solution: Addressing the HPC and Tech Talent Gap

March 15, 2024

Generations of Houstonian teachers, counselors, and parents have either worked in the aerospace industry or know people who do - the prospect of entering the fi Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire