Category: News

Melissa Schoenlein was awarded a 2023-2024 UW-Madison Capstone Teaching Award

Melissa Schoenlein was awarded a 2023-2024 UW-Madison Capstone Teaching Award for her course Psychology of Information Visualization (Spring 2023)! This award recognizes dissertators at the end of their graduate program with an outstanding teaching record over the course of their UW–Madison tenure.

Melissa’s students especially appreciated how she facilitated discussion in an open, inclusive class environment.  One student wrote, “Melissa’s passion for the material was salient. Yet, even when it was clear that she could go on about a topic for hours, she stepped back and let us drive the conversation with her guidance.” Another student commented, “Melissa did a great job of creating a space where people wanted to share their thoughts and opinions. There were rarely pauses because everyone actively wanted to share commentary.” Congratulations Melissa!

Melina Mueller Awarded a 2024 Psychology Department Undergraduate Travel Award

Melina Mueller received a UW–Madison Department of Psychology Spring Undergraduate Travel Award to present her research at the 2024 meeting of the Vision Sciences Society:

Effects of novel color categories on color-concept association generalization
By Melissa A. Schoenlein, Melina O. Mueller, and Karen B. Schloss

Zoe Howard Awarded a 2024 Hilldale Undergraduate/Faculty Research Fellowship

Congratulations to Zoe Howard for receiving a Hilldale Undergraduate/Faculty Research Fellowship! This fellowship 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 Zoe’s honors thesis project investigating the effects of texture enlargements on texture semantics for scaled data visualizations.

Graduate admissions for Fall 2024

Professor Karen Schloss will consider new graduate students for admission for Fall 2024. Prospective PhD students are encouraged to apply to the UW-Madison Psychology PhD program. Please click here for information about our program and how to apply. We look forward to reviewing your applications!

New Publication: More of what? Dissociating effects of conceptual and numeric mappings on interpreting colormap data visualizations

Our paper, “More of what? Dissociating effects of conceptual and numeric mappings on interpreting colormap data visualizations,” was published in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications.

AUthors: LEXI SOTO,  MELISSA A. SCHOENLEIN, and Karen B. Schloss

In visual communication, people glean insights about patterns of data by observing visual representations of datasets. Colormap data visualizations (“colormaps”) show patterns in datasets by mapping variations in color to variations in magnitude. When people interpret colormaps, they have expectations about how colors map to magnitude, and they are better at interpreting visualizations that align with those expectations. For example, they infer that darker colors map to larger quantities (dark-is-more bias) and colors that are higher on vertically oriented legends map to larger quantities (high-is-more bias). In previous studies, the notion of quantity was straightforward because more of the concept represented (conceptual magnitude) corresponded to larger numeric values (numeric magnitude). However, conceptual and numeric magnitude can conflict, such as using rank order to quantify health—smaller numbers correspond to greater health. Under conflicts, are inferred mappings formed based on the numeric level, the conceptual level, or a combination of both? We addressed this question across five experiments, spanning data domains: alien animals, antibiotic discovery, and public health. Across experiments, the high-is-more bias operated at the conceptual level: colormaps were easier to interpret when larger conceptual magnitude was represented higher on the legend, regardless of numeric magnitude. The dark-is-more bias tended to operate at the conceptual level, but numeric magnitude could interfere, or even dominate, if conceptual magnitude was less salient. These results elucidate factors influencing meanings inferred from visual features and emphasize the need to consider data meaning, not just numbers, when designing visualizations aimed to facilitate visual communication.

Reference: Soto, L., Schoenlein, M. A., & Schloss, K. B. (2023). More of what? Dissociating effects of conceptual and numeric mappings on interpreting colormap data visualizations. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 8, 38, 1-17. PDF

 

Melina Mueller Awarded a Hilldale Undergraduate/Faculty Research Fellowship

Melina Mueller headshotCongratulations 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!