Abstract:
People have difficulty understanding statistical information and are unaware
of their wrong judgments, particularly in Bayesian reasoning. Psychology
studies suggest that the way Bayesian problems are represented can impact
comprehension, but few visual designs have been evaluated and only
populations with a specific background have been involved. In this study, a
textual and six visual representations for three classic problems were
compared using a diverse subject pool through crowdsourcing. Visualizations
included area-proportional Euler diagrams, glyph representations, and hybrid
diagrams combining both. Our study failed to replicate previous findings in
that subjects' accuracy was remarkably lower and visualizations exhibited no
measurable benefit. A second experiment confirmed that simply adding a
visualization to a textual Bayesian problem is of little help, even when the
text refers to the visualization, but suggests that visualizations are more
effective when the text is given without numerical values. We discuss our
findings and the need for more such experiments to be carried out on
heterogeneous populations of non-experts.