The Psychology of Visualization

This document is a review of the literature of three related areas: psychophysical vision research, automatic display generation, and multi-dimensional data visualization. Common threads are explored, and a model of the visualization process is proposed which integrates aspects of these three areas.

In the review of psychophysics, attempts to find a set of primitive perceptual channels are explored. In the literature on automatic generation and visualization, attempts to employ these psychophysical findings are investigated. Finally, the proposed model is a framework which might facilitate this kind of cooperation.