Perception of direction changes in animated data visualization

This study was inspired by the task of revealing similarity in the development of financial indicators. We use a simplified analogy of animated scatterplots for time-dependent financial data and focus on perceptual aspects of animated data visualization. We are interested in the parameters of item coherent motion that affect detection of direction change in an item subset. The motion velocity and the angular difference in the subset motion were varied consistently. The rate of correct responses and reaction times (RTs) served as performance measures. Our results provide guidance for designing motion-based information visualization tools.