AN EXPERIMENT IN GRAPHICAL PERCEPTION

Graphical perception is the visual decoding of categorical and quantitative information from a graph. Increasing our basic understanding of graphical perception will allow us to make graphs that convey quantitative information to viewers with more accuracy and efficiency. This paper describes an experiment that was conducted to investigate the accuracy of six basic judgments of graphical perception. Two types of position judgments were found to be the most accurate, length judgments were second, angle and slope judgments were third, and area judgments were last. Distance between judged objects was found to be a factor in the accuracy of the basic judgments.