Vision provides rapid processing for some tasks, but encounters strong constraints from others. Although many tasks encounter a capacity limit of processing four visual objects at once, some evidence suggests far lower limits for processing relationships among objects. What is our capacity limit for relational processing? If it is indeed limited, then people may miss important relationships between data values in a graph. To test this question, we asked people to explore graphs of trivially simple 2 × 2 data sets and found that half of the viewers missed surprising and improbable relationships (e.g., a child's height decreasing over time). These relationships were spotted easily in a control condition, which implicitly directed viewers to prioritize inspecting the key relationships. Thus, a severe limit on relational processing, combined with a cascade of other capacity-limited operations (e.g., linking values to semantic content), makes understanding a graph more like slowly reading a paragraph then immediately recognizing an image. These results also highlight the practical importance of "data storytelling" techniques, where communicators design graphs that help their audience prioritize the most important relationships in data. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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阅读图表就像阅读段落。


视觉为某些任务提供快速处理，但会遇到其他任务的强烈限制。尽管许多任务遇到一次处理四个视觉对象的能力限制，但一些证据表明处理对象之间关系的限制要低得多。我们的关系处理能力限制是多少？如果它确实受到限制，那么人们可能会错过图表中数据值之间的重要关系。为了测试这个问题，我们要求人们探索极其简单的 2 × 2 数据集的图表，发现一半的观众错过了令人惊讶和不可能的关系（例如，孩子的身高随着时间的推移而下降）。这些关系在控制条件下很容易被发现，这隐含地引导观众优先检查关键关系。因此，对关系处理的严格限制，与一系列其他容量有限的操作（例如，将值链接到语义内容）相结合，使得理解图形更像是慢慢阅读段落，然后立即识别图像。这些结果还强调了“数据讲故事”技术的实际重要性，其中传播者设计图表来帮助受众优先考虑数据中最重要的关系。 （PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。