The Impact of Shape on the Perception of Euler Diagrams

Euler diagrams are often used for visualizing data collected into sets. However, there is a significant lack of guidance regarding graphical choices for Euler diagram layout. To address this deficiency, this paper asks the question `does the shape of a closed curve affect a user's comprehension of an Euler diagram?' By empirical study, we establish that curve shape does indeed impact on understandability. Our analysis of performance data indicates that circles perform best, followed by squares, with ellipses and rectangles jointly performing worst. We conclude that, where possible, circles should be used to draw effective Euler diagrams. Further, the ability to discriminate curves from zones and the symmetry of the curve shapes is argued to be important. We utilize perceptual theory to explain these results. As a consequence of this research, improved diagram layout decisions can be made for Euler diagrams whether they are manually or automatically drawn

Euler diagrams drawn with ellipses area‑proportionally (Edeap)

Background: Area-proportional Euler diagrams are frequently used to visualize data from Microarray experiments, but are also applied to a wide variety of other data from biosciences, social networks and other domains. Results: This paper details Edeap, a new simple, scalable method for drawing areaproportional Euler diagrams with ellipses. We use a search-based technique optimizing a multi-criteria objective function that includes measures for both area accuracy and usability, and which can be extended to further user-defned criteria. The Edeap software is available for use on the web, and the code is open source. In addition to describing our system, we present the frst extensive evaluation of software for producing area-proportional Euler diagrams, comparing Edeap to the current state-of-the-art; circle-based method, venneuler, and an alternative ellipse-based method, eulerr. Conclusions: Our evaluation—using data from the Gene Ontology database via GoMiner, Twitter data from the SNAP database, and randomly generated data sets—shows an ordering for accuracy (from best to worst) of eulerr, followed by Edeap and then venneuler. In terms of runtime, the results are reversed with venneuler being the fastest, followed by Edeap and fnally eulerr. Regarding scalability, eulerr cannot draw non-trivial diagrams beyond 11 sets, whereas no such limitation is present in Edeap or venneuler, both of which draw diagrams up to the tested limit of 20 sets

Iconic logic: the visual art of drawing the right conclusion

Most people, evidence suggests, have a hard time thinking straight. Symbolic logic is a tool that can help remedy this problem. Unfortunately, it is highly abstract and uses symbols whose meanings rely on unintuitive arbitrary conventions. Without sacrificing rigor, iconic logic is more concrete and uses icons that resemble what they stand for and whose meanings are thus easier to picture, process, and remember. Here I review and critique iconic existential graphs and concept diagrams—the former link iconic logic to iconic mathematics; the latter expand popular Euler or Venn diagrams and have, to some degree, been empirically investigated for user-friendliness. I lay out how expertise in perception, cognition, and genetics can inform and improve such empirical research to help make iconic logic more ergonomic. After all, logic is a tool, and tools should not only suit their use but also their user

Human Reasoning and Description Logics: Applying Psychological Theory to Understand and Improve the Usability of Description Logics

Description Logics (DLs) are now the most commonly used ontology languages, in part because of the development of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) standards. Yet it is accepted that DLs are difficult to comprehend and work with, particularly for ontology users who are not computer scientists. The Manchester OWL Syntax (MOS) was developed to make DLs more accessible, by using English keywords in place of logic symbols or formal language. Nevertheless, DLs continue to present difficulties, even when represented in MOS. There has been some investigation of what features cause difficulties, specifically in the context of understanding how an entailment (i.e. an inference) follows from a justification (i.e. a minimal subset of the ontology that is sufficient for the entailment to hold), as is required when debugging an ontology. However, there has been little attempt to relate these difficulties to how people naturally reason and use language. This dissertation draws on theories of reasoning from cognitive psychology, and also insights from the philosophy of language, to understand the difficulties experienced with DLs and to make suggestions to mitigate those difficulties. The language features investigated were those known to be commonly used, both on the basis of analyses reported in the literature and after a survey of ontology users. Two experimental studies investigated participants’ ability to reason with DL statements. These studies demonstrate that insights from psychology and the philosophy of language can be used both to understand the difficulties experienced and to make proposals to mitigate those difficulties. The studies suggest that people reason using both the manipulation of syntax and the representation of semantics with mental models; both approaches can lead to errors. Particular difficulties were associated with: functional object properties; negated conjunction; the interaction of negation and the existential or universal restrictions; and nested restrictions. Proposals to mitigate these difficulties include the adoption of new language keywords; tool enhancement, e.g. to provide syntactically alternative expressions; and the introduction during training both of De Morgan’s Laws for conjunction and disjunction, and their analogues for existential and universal restrictions. A third study then investigated the effectiveness of the proposed new keywords; finding that these keywords could mitigate some of the difficulties experienced. Apart from the immediate applicability of these results to DLs, the approach taken in this dissertation could be extended widely to computer languages, including languages for interacting with databases and with Linked Data. Additionally, based on the experience of the three studies, the dissertation makes some methodological recommendations which are relevant to a range of human-computer interaction studies

The Measure of a Man: A Critical Methodology for Investigating Essentialist Beliefs about Sexual Orientation Categories in Japan and the United States

Methods for studying laypeople’s beliefs about sexual orientation categories have evolved in step with larger theoretical and epistemological shifts in the interdisciplinary study of sexuality. The dominant approach to measuring laypeople’s sexual orientation beliefs over the past decade was made possible through an epistemological shift from a nature vs. nurture paradigm to a social constructionist theoretical model of psychological essentialism (Medin, 1989; Medin & Ortony, 1989; Rothbart & Taylor, 1992). Despite this shift, I argue that the forced-response scale-based survey methodologies typically used to operationally define essentialist beliefs about sexual orientation at best only partially realize the social constructionist potential of this underlying theory. By critically reconstructing this theory of psychological essentialism from an epistemological stance rooted in discourse, I developed a methodology reliant not on investigators’ but rather laypeople’s own mobilization of culturally shared discourses of sexuality. In testing this methodology, I focus on one theoretical dimension of psychological essentialism—inductive potential, or the extent to which shared knowledge about category membership allows for inference of a wealth of associated information about specific category members. I explored this critical methodology through a mixed-method empirical investigation of laypeople’s beliefs in the inductive potential of sexual orientation categories in relation to two components of sexuality: sexual desire and romantic love. I sought to answer two research questions: To what extent, and in what ways, do laypeople discursively mobilize inductive potential beliefs about homosexual or heterosexual men’s sexual desire and romantic love? To what extent, and in what ways, is laypeople’s discursive mobilization of those inductive potential beliefs explained by their gendered and/or cultural contexts? In Study 1, I primed cultural discourses of sexual orientation categories prior to an impression formation task. Students from four-year public universities in the Tokyo (N = 197; ages 18-23) and New York City (N = 208; ages 18-25) metropolitan areas read a series of fictional diary entries featuring a male college student (the target) describing his attraction to either a female or male classmate. Each participant then manually drew a Euler diagram comprised of circles representing their impressions of the relative importance (circle size) and interrelationships between (circle overlap) six identities associated with the target. To the extent participants engaged in inductive potential beliefs, I predicted that: (H1) participants would perceive sexual desire as more centrally defining of a same-sex attracted male target relative to an other-sex attracted male target; and (H2) participants would perceive romantic love as less centrally defining of a same-sex attracted male target relative to an other-sex attracted male target. Fitting multiple circle size and overlap outcomes to separate generalized linear models, I found a consistent pattern of support for both predictions. Cultural and gendered differences added additional nuance to these experimental patterns: Japanese participants associated men with greater sexual desire and less romantic love relative to their US peers, regardless of perceived sexual orientation. Additionally, US and Japanese men, compared to women, appeared to associate these two components of sexuality more frequently with men’s social roles. As such, while these results strongly suggested the presence of participants’ inductive potential beliefs about sexual orientation categories, they also pointed to important variation across culture and gender. In an effort to discursively unpack the inductively rich meanings associated with these additional gendered and cultural patterns, as well as establish the cultural credibility of my interpretations of the results of this experimental manipulation, in a second study I engaged separate peer focus groups in New York City (N = 20; ages 19-25) and Tokyo (N = 21; ages 20- 24) in discursively interpreting the Euler diagrams produced in Study 1. Using thematic analysis, I identified three themes concerning the ways several distinct sexual orientation discourses were culturally understood in the US and Japan; the ways those discourses were imbricated with other distinct discourses of cultural identity; and the ways laypeople voiced resistance to these sexual orientation discourses. I concluded that the experimental pattern from Study 1 could be explained in part through US participants’ rejection of an essentialist discourse of binary sexual orientation in favor of a focus on sexual practices; Japanese participants’ responses marked instead a troubling of essentialist discourses of binary gender. Taken together, these findings from Study 1 and 2 implicate sexual orientation as an inductively potent discourse in laypeople’s construction of beliefs about male sexuality across cultural contexts and genders, albeit in cultural distinct ways. These results thus add to past research on essentialist beliefs while also highlighting a need for critical methodologies sensitive to the ways culturally embedded and multiply imbricated transnational discourses of sexuality inform beliefs about men