Congratulations to Zoe Howard and Melina Mueller for receiving an Outstanding Undergraduate Research Scholar (OURS) Award. This award recognizes outstanding undergraduate Psychology majors for their contribution to research in our department. We thank Zoe and Melina for their outstanding work in our lab!
Category: News
Melina Mueller Awarded a Hilldale Undergraduate/Faculty Research Fellowship
Congratulations to Melina Mueller for receiving a Hilldale Undergraduate/Faculty Research Fellowship, which provides research training and support for undergraduates to undertake their own research project in collaboration with UW–Madison faculty or research/instructional academic staff. This award will support Melina’s honors thesis project investigating the effects of verbal interference on color category extrapolation for learning novel color-concept associations (advised by PI Karen Schloss and graduate student Melissa Schoenlein).
Melina Mueller Awarded Department of Psychology Serendipity Award
Congratulations to Melina Mueller for receiving the UW-Madison Department of Psychology Serendipity Award! The Serendipity Award, funded by Dr. Aris Alexander, recognizes an undergraduate student who has distinguished themselves through hard work, talent, and dedication, drawing the attention of a faculty member in whose lab they work. Thank you Melina for your strong work on research and service in our lab and beyond!
Clementine Zimnicki awarded 2022 Elsevier/Vision Research Travel Award
Clementine Zimnicki received a 2023 Elsevier/Vision Research Travel Award to present her work at the Annual Meeting of the Vision Sciences Society. Congratulations Clementine!
Presentation title: “Hue variation masks effects of lightness on interpretations of colormap data visualizations”
New Publication: Red and blue states: dichotomized maps mislead and reduce perceived voting influence
Our paper, “Red and blue states: dichotomized maps mislead and reduce perceived voting influence,” was published in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications.
AUthors: Rémy A. Furrur, Karen B. Schloss, Gary Lupyan, Paula M. Neidenthal, and Adrienne Wood
In the United States the color red has come to represent the Republican party, and blue the Democratic party, in maps of voting patterns. Here we test the hypothesis that voting maps dichotomized into red and blue states leads people to overestimate political polarization compared to maps in which states are represented with continuous gradations of color. We also tested whether any polarizing effect is due to partisan semantic associations with red and blue, or if alternative hues produce similar efects. In Study 1, participants estimated the hypothetical voting patterns of eight swing states on maps with dichotomous or continuous red/blue or orange/green color schemes. A continuous gradient mitigated the polarizing efects of red/blue maps on voting predictions. We also found that a novel hue pair, green/orange, decreased perceived polarization. Whether this efect was due to the novelty of the hues or the fact that the hues were not explicitly labeled “Democrat” and “Republican” was unclear. In Study 2, we explicitly assigned green/orange hues to the two parties. Participants viewed electoral maps depicting results from the 2020 presidential election and estimated the voting margins for a subset of states. We replicated the finding that continuous red/blue gradient reduced perceived polarization, but the novel hues did not reduce perceived polarization. Participants also expected their hypothetical vote to matter more when viewing maps with continuous color gradations. We conclude that the dichotomization of electoral maps (not the particular hues) increases perceived voting polarization and reduces a voter’s expected influence on election outcomes.
New Publication: Unifying Effects of Direct and Relational Associations for Visual Communication
Our paper, “Unifying Effects of Direct and Relational Associations for Visual Communication,” was published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
AUthors: Melissa A. Schoenlein, Jonny Campos, Kevin J. Lande, Laurent Lessard, and Karen B. Schloss
People have expectations about how colors map to concepts in visualizations, and they are better at interpreting visualizations that match their expectations. Traditionally, studies on these expectations (inferred mappings) distinguished distinct factors relevant for visualizations of categorical vs. continuous information. Studies on categorical information focused on direct associations (e.g., mangos are associated with yellows) whereas studies on continuous information focused on relational associations (e.g., darker colors map to larger quantities; dark-is-more bias). We unite these two areas within a single framework of assignment inference. Assignment inference is the process by which people infer mappings between perceptual features and concepts represented in encoding systems. Observers infer globally optimal assignments by maximizing the “merit,” or “goodness,” of each possible assignment. Previous work on assignment inference focused on visualizations of categorical information. We extend this approach to visualizations of continuous data by (a) broadening the notion of merit to include relational associations and (b) developing a method for combining multiple (sometimes conflicting) sources of merit to predict people’s inferred mappings. We developed and tested our model on data from experiments in which participants interpreted colormap data visualizations, representing fictitious data about environmental concepts (sunshine, shade, wild fire, ocean water, glacial ice). We found both direct and relational associations contribute independently to inferred mappings. These results can be used to optimize visualization design to facilitate visual communication
Reference: Schoenlein, M. A., Campos, J., Lande, K. J., Lessard, L., & Schloss, K. B. (2023). Unifying Effects of Direct and Relational Associations for Visual Communication. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 29, 1, 385-395. PDF
Recruiting graduate students for Fall 2023
The Schloss Visual Reasoning Lab is recruiting qualified graduate students to start in Fall 2023 in the Department of Psychology and Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison!
If you are interested in joining the lab as a PhD student, please send Karen Schloss an introductory email that outlines your research interests and explains why our lab would be a good place to pursue those interests. Please also include your current academic CV in your email.
Before reaching out to us, please familiarize yourself with the lab’s current research. We suggest reading the following two papers, which will give you a sense of the ongoing work in the lab and the kind of research you may do if you join our group:
(1) Unifying effects of direct and relational associations for visual communication
(2) Context matters: A theory of semantic discriminability for perceptual encoding systems
We look forward to hearing from you!
PI Karen Schloss was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure
PI Karen Schloss has been promoted to Associate professor with tenure!
She is extremely grateful to her students, collaborators, mentors, colleagues, friends, family, and the staff in Psychology and WID for their support in the process.
Go Badgers!
New Publication: Color-concept association formation for novel concepts
Our new paper, “Color-concept association formation for novel concepts,” was published in Visual Cognition.
AUthors: Melissa A. Schoenlein and Karen B. Schloss
Color-concept associations influence fundamental processes in cognition and perception, including object recognition, color perception, and visual reasoning. To fully understand these effects, it is necessary to understand how color-concept associations are formed. It is assumed that color-concept associations are learned through experiences in the world, but questions remain concerning how association formation is influenced by properties of the input and cognitive factors during input. We addressed these questions by first exposing participants to color-concept co-occurrences for novel concepts (“Filk” and “Slub” alien species) using a category learning task. We then assessed color-concept associations using an association rating task. During alien species category learning, color was a noisy cue and shape was 100% diagnostic of species category membership, so participants could have ignored color to complete the task. Nonetheless, participants learned systematic color-concept associations for “seen” colors during alien category learning and generalized to “unseen” colors as a function of color distance from the seen colors (Experiment 1). Association formation not only depended on color-alien co-occurrences during the alien category learning task, but also depended on cognitive structure of color categories (e.g., degree to which an observed red color is typical of the color category “red”) (Experiment 2). Thus, environmental and cognitive factors combine to influence color-concept associations formed from experiences in the world.
Reference: Schoenlein, M. A. & Schloss, K. B. (2022). Color-concept association formation for novel concepts. Visual Cognition. PDF
New Publication: A holey perspective on Venn diagrams
Our new paper, “A holey perspective on Venn diagrams,” was published in Cognitive Science.
Authors: Anna N. Bartel, Kevin J. Lande, Joris Roos, and Karen B. Schloss
When interpreting the meanings of visual features in information visualizations, observers have expectations about how visual features map onto concepts (“inferred mappings”). In this study we examined whether aspects of inferred mappings, previously identified for other types of visualizations (e.g., colormap data visualizations), generalize to a different type of visualization, Venn diagrams. Venn diagrams offer an interesting test case because empirical evidence about the nature of inferred mappings for colormaps suggests that established conventions for Venn diagrams are counterintuitive. Venn diagrams represent classes using overlapping circles and express logical relationships between those classes by shading out regions to encode the concept of non-existence, or none. We propose that people do not simply expect shading to signify non-existence, but rather they expect regions that appear as holes to signify non-existence (the “hole hypothesis”). The appearance of a hole depends on perceptual properties in the diagram in relation to its background. Across three experiments, results supported the hole hypothesis, underscoring the importance of configural processing for interpreting the meanings of visual features in information visualizations.
Reference: Bartel, A. N., Lande, K. J., Roos, J., & Schloss, K. B. (2021). A holey perspective on Venn diagrams. Cognitive Science, 46, 1, e13073. PDF