Juvenile Graphical Perception: A Comparison between Children and Adults

Abstract

Data visualization is pervasive in the lives of children as they en-counter graphs and charts in early education and online media.In spite of this prevalence, our guidelines and understanding ofhow children perceive graphs stem primarily from studies con-ducted with adults. Previous psychology and education researchindicates that children’s cognitive abilities are different from adults.Therefore, we conducted a classic graphical perception study on apopulation of children aged 8–12 enrolled in the Ivy After SchoolProgram in Boston, MA and adult computer science students en-rolled in Northeastern University to determine how accuratelyparticipants judge differences in particular graphical encodings. We record the accuracy of participants’ answers for five encodingsmost commonly used with quantitative data. The results of ourcontrolled experiment show that children have remarkably similargraphical perception to adults, but are consistently less accurateat interpreting the visual encodings. We found similar effective-ness rankings, relative differences in error between the differentencodings, and patterns of bias across encoding types. Based on ourfindings, we provide design guidelines and recommendations forcreating visualizations for children. This paper and all supplementalmaterials are available at https://osf.io/ygrdv.

Graphicacy across age, education, and culture: a new tool to assess intuitive graphics skills

“…The second motivation of our study was to investigate whether intuitive graphics skills were available uniquely to individuals previously exposed to graphical representations, or whether they could be found in the absence of any such exposure. Children seem able to discriminate graphs based on the location and size of datapoints (Panavas et al, 2022), but no study to date tested whether they can perform statistical judgments on them. We show here that French 6-years-old children (unexposed to graphical representations) and uneducated Himba (living in an unindustrialized society in Northern Namibia where graphs are essentially absent) base their intuitive decisions on the t -value of the scatterplot.…”