The Curse of Knowledge in Visual Data Communication
Xiong, van Weelden and Franconeri note that different viewers can see different patterns in the same visualisation, which can cause miscommunication. They show that when people are primed to see one pattern as visually salient, they believe that naive viewers will see the same pattern as salient. Participants heard one of several backstories about events that affected public data before viewing a graph, then predicted what naive viewers would find most salient, and they strongly expected naive viewers to see the pattern the backstory had made salient to them.
Xiong, van Weelden and Franconeri note that different viewers can see different patterns in the same visualisation, which can cause miscommunication. They show that when people are primed to see one pattern as visually salient, they believe that naive viewers will see the same pattern as salient. Participants heard one of several backstories about events that affected public data before viewing a graph, then predicted what naive viewers would find most salient, and they strongly expected naive viewers to see the pattern the backstory had made salient to them.
Written from the abstract as shown on the OpenAlex record, read 2026-11-04.
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Xiong, C., van Weelden, L., & Franconeri, S. (2020). The curse of knowledge in visual data communication. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 26(10), 3051-3062. doi:10.1109/TVCG.2019.2917689