The paper investigates whether the methods chosen for representing uncertain geographic information aids or impairs decision-making in the context of wildfire hazard. Through a series of three human subject experiments, utilizing 180 subjects and employing increasingly di cult tasks, this research evaluates the e↵ect of five di↵erent visualizations and a text based representation on decisionmaking under uncertainty. Our quantitative experiments focus specifically on the task of decision-making under uncertainty, rather than the task of reading levels of uncertainty from the map. To guard against the potential for generosity and risk seeking in decision-making under uncertainty, the experimental design uses performance-based incentives. The experiments showed that the choice of representation makes little di↵erence to performance in cases where subjects are allowed the time and focus to consider their decisions. However, with the increasing di culty of time pressure, subjects performed best using a spectral color hue-based representation, rather than more carefully designed cartographic representations. Text-based and simplified boundary encodings were amongst the worst performers. The results have implications for the performance of decision-making under uncertainty using static maps, especially in the stressful environments surrounding an emergency.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.