Proposed Working Memory Measures for Evaluating Information Visualization Tools

The current information visualization literature highlights design and evaluation processes that are highly variable and situation dependent, which raises at least two broad challenges. First, lack of a standardized evaluation criterion leads to costly re-designs for each task and specific user community. Second, this inadequacy in criterion validation raises significant uncertainty regarding visualization outputs and their related decisions, which may be especially troubling in high consequence environments like those of intelligence analysts. We seek ways to standardize the "apples and oranges" of the extant situation through tools based upon general principles of human cognition. Theoretically, information visualization tools enable the user to see information in a way that should attenuate the user's memory load and increase the user's task-available cognitive resources. By using general cognitive abilities, like available working memory resources, as a dependent measure, we propose standardized evaluative capabilities can be generalized across contexts, tasks, and user communities.