DECISIVe 2014 : 1st Workshop on Dealing with Cognitive Biases in Visualisations

Abstract

Our inherent reliance on mental shortcuts, or heuristics, sometimes results in deviations in judgment from what rational decision models would predict. These deviations are known as cognitive biases. Heuristics allow us to make "good enough" decisions without expending all of our cognitive effort on the task, however, in critical decision environments, "good enough" is often NOT good enough. Visualisation tools are increasingly adept at making sense of complex data, but researchers who study cognitive biases have come to realise that the quality of decisions made with these tools are often impaired because tool designers fail to address how heuristics and biases operate in a human-computer interactive setting. Despite decades of research on cognitive biases in controlled settings, there is yet no "recipe book" for experimentally-validated tools and techniques to avoid judgment biases when building tools for solving complex problems in the real world. This workshop brings together cognitive researchers and visualisation developers to explore some of the ways in which biases impact user performance and share ideas and experiences about practical ways to reduce or overcome these potentially harmful effects.