Lace Padilla

• Ph.D., M.F.A.
• Professor (Assistant) at University of California, Merced

Probability density function (PDF) curves are among the few charts on a Cartesian coordinate system that are commonly presented without y-axes. This design decision may be due to the lack of relevance of vertical scaling in normal PDFs. In fact, as long as two normal PDFs have the same means and standard deviations (SDs), they can be scaled to occu...

Small multiples are a popular visualization method, displaying different views of a dataset using multiple frames, often with the same scale and axes. However, there is a need to address their potential constraints, especially in the context of human cognitive capacity limits. These limits dictate the maximum information our mind can process at onc...

Small multiples are a popular visualization method, displaying different views of a dataset using multiple frames, often with the same scale and axes. However, there is a need to address their potential constraints, especially in the context of human cognitive capacity limits. These limits dictate the maximum information our mind can process at onc...

As the popularity of social media has dramatically increased, it is crucial to understand how individuals process the information from these social media scrolling information feeds. The cognitive fit theory suggests that the perceived fit between the technology (medium) and task influences performance. Therefore, we predict that a social media fee...

As the popularity of social media has dramatically increased, it is crucial to understand how individuals process the information from these social media scrolling information feeds. Most scrolling feed media tend to summarize and chunk information into discrete units. In memory, this approach can improve recall performance by expanding the amount...

The prevalence of inadequate SARS-COV-2 (COVID-19) responses may indicate a lack of trust in forecasts and risk communication. However, no work has empirically tested how multiple forecast visualization choices impact trust and task-based performance. The three studies presented in this paper (N = 1299) examine how visualization choices impact trus...

The prevalence of inadequate SARS-COV-2 (COVID-19) responses may indicate a lack of trust in forecasts and risk communication. However, no work has empirically tested how multiple forecast visualization choices impact trust and task-based performance. The three studies presented in this paper (N = 1299) examine how visualization choices impact trus...

People worldwide use SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) visualizations to make life and death decisions about pandemic risks. Understanding how these visualizations influence risk perceptions to improve pandemic communication is crucial. To examine how COVID-19 visualizations influence risk perception, we conducted two experiments online in October and December...

Effectively designed data visualizations allow viewers to use their powerful visual systems to understand patterns in data across science, education, health, and public policy. But ineffectively designed visualizations can cause confusion, misunderstanding, or even distrust—especially among viewers with low graphical literacy. We review research-ba...

Transparent research practices enable the research design, materials, analytic methods, and data to be thoroughly evaluated and potentially reproduced. The HCI community has recognized research transparency as one quality aspect of paper submission and review since CHI 2021. This course addresses HCI researchers and students already knowledgeable a...

As uncertainty visualizations for general audiences become increasingly common, designers must understand the full impact of uncertainty communication techniques on viewers' decision processes. Prior work demonstrates mixed performance outcomes with respect to how individuals make decisions using various visual and textual depictions of uncertainty...

People worldwide use SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) visualizations to make life and death decisions about pandemic risks. Understanding how COVID-19 visualizations influence risk perceptions to improve pandemic communication is crucial. To examine how COVID-19 visualizations influence risk perception, we conducted two experiments ( N = 2,549) during the hei...

As uncertainty visualizations for general audiences become increasingly common, designers must understand the full impact of uncertainty communication techniques on viewers' decision processes. Prior work demonstrates mixed performance outcomes with respect to how individuals make decisions using various visual and textual depictions of uncertainty...

Producing flood risk and flood observation data does not necessarily lead to better decision‐making for flood preparedness and response. In the absence of technical capacity from potential users to review flood risk and observation data for specific flood management use‐cases, there is a risk that additional data, regardless of quality, leads to in...

Making decisions with uncertainty is challenging for the general public, policymakers, and even highly trained scientists. Nevertheless, when faced with the need to respond to a potential hazard, people must make high-risk decisions with uncertainty. In some cases, people have to consider multiple hazards with various types of uncertainties. Multip...

Policy-makers and the general public have made decisions using COVID-19 data visualizations that have affected the health of the global population. However, the impact that such wide use of data visualizations has had on people's beliefs about their personal risk for COVID-19 is unclear. We conducted two experiments (N = 2,549) during the height of...

Many metaphors in language reflect conceptual metaphors that structure thought. In line with metaphorical expressions such as ‘high number’, experiments show that people associate larger numbers with upward space. Consistent with this metaphor, high numbers are conventionally depicted in high positions on the $y$ -axis of line graphs. People also...

In response to COVID-19, a vast number of visualizations have been created to communicate information to the public. Information exposure in a public health crisis can impact people’s attitudes towards and responses to the crisis and risks, and ultimately the trajectory of a pandemic. As such, there is a need for work that documents, organizes, and...

Uncertainty communicators often use visualizations to express the unknowns in data, statistical analyses, and forecasts. Well-designed visualizations can clearly and effectively convey uncertainty, which is vital for ensuring transparency, accuracy, and scientific credibility. However, poorly designed uncertainty visualizations can lead to misunder...

While uncertainty is present in most data analysis pipelines, reasoning with uncertainty is challenging for novices and experts alike. Fortunately, researchers are making significant advancements in the communication of uncertainty. In this article, we detail new visualization methods and emerging cognitive theories that describe how we reason with...

Studies in the psychology of visual expertise have tended to focus on a limited set of expert domains, such as radiology and athletics. Conclusions drawn from these data indicate that experts use parafoveal vision to process images holistically. In this study, we examined a novel, as-of-yet-unstudied class of visual experts—architects—expecting sim...

When forecasting events, multiple types of uncertainty are often inherently present in the modeling process. Various uncertainty typologies exist, and each type of uncertainty has different implications a scientist might want to convey. In this work, we focus on one type of distinction between direct quantitative uncertainty and indirect qualitativ...

We conducted a preregistered exploratory survey to assess whether patterns of individual differences in political orientation, social dominance orientation (SDO), traditionalism, conspiracy ideation, or attitudes about science predict willingness to share different kinds of misinformation regarding the COVID-19 pandemic online. Analyses revealed tw...

This work presents an approach for visualizing aggregate spatial risk data for natural hazards in a way which is not restricted by fixed geographical boundaries and is intended to improve multi-risk awareness in at-risk populations. First, spatial proximity is analyzed to organize occurrences in clusters and the convex hull of each cluster is creat...

We conducted a preregistered exploratory survey to assess whether patterns of individual differences in political orientation, social dominance orientation, traditionalism, conspiracy ideation, or attitudes about science predict willingness to share different kinds of misinformation regarding the COVID-19 pandemic online. Analyses revealed two orth...

While uncertainty is present in most data analysis pipelines, reasoning with uncertainty is challenging for novices and experts alike. Fortunately, researchers are making significant advancements in the communication of uncertainty. In this chapter, we detail new visualization methods and emerging cognitive theories that describe how we reason with...

Given the widespread use of visualizations to communicate hazard risks, forecast visualizations must be as effective to interpret as possible. However, despite incorporating best practices, visualizations can influence viewer judgments in ways that the designers did not anticipate. Visualization designers should understand the full implications of...

Given the widespread use of visualizations and their impact on health and safety, it is important to ensure that viewers interpret visualizations as accurately as possible. Ensemble visualizations are an increasingly popular method for visualizing data, as emerging research demonstrates that ensembles can effectively and intuitively communicate tra...

Ensemble displays are increasing in popularity, as emerging research demonstrates that ensemble displays can, in some contexts, effectively and intuitively communicate traditionally difficult statistical concepts to novice viewers, such as uncertainty.

Given the widespread use of visualizations to communicate hazard risks, forecast visualizations must be as effective to interpret as possible. However, despite incorporating best practices, visualizations can influence viewer judgments in ways that the designers did not anticipate. Visualization designers should understand the full implications of...

Given the widespread use of visualizations to communicate hazard risks, forecast visualizations must be as effective to interpret as possible. However, despite incorporating best practices, visualizations can influence viewer judgments in ways that the designers did not anticipate. Visualization designers should understand the full implications of...

Cognitive science has established widely used and validated procedures for evaluating working memory in numerous applied domains, but surprisingly few studies have employed these methodologies to assess claims about the impacts of visualizations on working memory. The lack of information visualization research that uses validated procedures for mea...

The Morris water maze is a task adapted from the animal spatial cognition literature and has been studied in the context of sex differences in humans, particularly because of the standard design, which manipulates proximal (close) and distal (far) cues. However, there are mixed findings with respect to the interaction of cues and sex differences in...

The visualization community has seen a rise in the adoption of user studies. Empirical user studies systematically test the assumptions that we make about how visualizations can help or hinder viewers' performance of tasks. Although the increase in user studies is encouraging, it is vital that research on human reasoning with visualizations be grou...

Two of the primary reasons rainbow color maps are considered ineffective trace back to the idea that they implicitly discretize encoded data into hue‐based bands, yet no research addresses what this discretization looks like or how consistent it is across individuals. This paper presents an exploratory study designed to empirically investigate the...

Cognitive science has established widely used and validated procedures for evaluating working memory in numerous applied domains, but surprisingly few studies have employed these methodologies to assess claims about the impacts of visualizations on working memory. The lack of information visualization research that uses validated procedures for mea...

Visualizations—visual representations of information, depicted in graphics—are studied by researchers in numerous ways, ranging from the study of the basic principles of creating visualizations, to the cognitive processes underlying their use, as well as how visualizations communicate complex information (such as in medical risk or spatial patterns...

The original article (Padilla et al., 2018) contained a formatting error in Table 2; this has now been corrected with the appropriate boxes marked clearly.

The visualization community has seen a rise in the adoption of user studies. Empirical user studies systematically test the assumptions that we make about how visualizations can help or hinder viewers’ performance of tasks. Although the increase in user studies is encouraging, it is vital that research on human reasoning with visualizations be grou...

Given the widespread use of visualizations and their impact on health and safety it is important to ensure that viewers interpret visualizations as accurately as possible. Ensemble visualizations are an increasingly popular method for visualizing data, as emerging research demonstrates that ensembles can effectively and intuitively communicate trad...

Ensemble and summary displays are two widely used methods to represent visual-spatial uncertainty; however, there is disagreement about which is the most effective technique to communicate uncertainty to the general public. Visualization scientists create ensemble displays by plotting multiple data points on the same Cartesian coordinate plane. Des...

It may be evolutionarily adaptive for parents to imagine a dangerous outcome when offspring have potential to be harmed. However, its possible that this only generalizes to harm avoidant individuals, a trait-level individual difference measured by a subset of the multidimensional personality questionnaire. Harm avoidance has previously been shown t...

The expressiveness principle for visualization design asserts that a visualization should encode all of the available data, and only the available data, implying that continuous data types should be visualized with a continuous encoding channel. And yet, in many domains binning continuous data is not only pervasive, but it is accepted as standard p...

Data ensembles are often used to infer statistics to be used for a summary display of an uncertain prediction. In a spatial context, these summary displays have the drawback that when uncertainty is encoded via a spatial spread, display glyph area increases in size with prediction uncertainty. This increase can be easily confounded with an increase...

The Morris water maze is a spatial abilities test adapted from the animal spatial cognition literature and has been studied in the context of sex differences in humans. This is because its standard design, which manipulates proximal (close) and distal (far) cues, applies to human navigation. However, virtual Morris water mazes test navigation skill...

Abstract. Mental rotation refers to the imagined transformation performed when making comparisons between objects that are presented at different orientations. It is one of the most frequently used measures of small-scale spatial abilities and typically shows a male advantage in response time and accuracy. One possible factor underlying sex differe...

Ensembles are commonly used to generate visualizations that encode uncertainty such as hurricane weather forecast displays. How- ever, when presenting forecast visualizations to the general public, the preferred method for displaying forecast ensembles is to aggregate the ensemble members and generate summary displays. One prevalent sum- mary displ...

Decision-making using weather forecasts with uncertainty have vast consequences for health and safety. Yet, little is known about how the framing of forecasts with uncertainty affects decision-making. Researchers have used Prospect Theory to provide a framework for cognition of forecasts that include Bayesian probabilities. However, Bayesian probab...

The fertility and parental care hypothesis interprets sex differences in some spatial-cognitive tasks as an adaptive mechanism to suppress women’s travel. In particular, the hypothesis argues that estrogens constrain travel during key reproductive periods by depressing women’s spatial-cognitive ability. Limiting travel reduces exposure to the dange...

Uncertainty represented in visualizations is often ignored or misunderstood by the non-expert user. The National Hurricane Center displays hurricane forecasts using a track forecast cone, depicting the expected track of the storm and the uncertainty in the forecast. Our goal was to test whether different graphical displays of a hurricane forecast c...

Sex differences in range size and navigation are widely reported, with males traveling farther than females, being less spatially anxious, and in many studies navigating more effectively. One explanation holds that these differences are the result of sexual selection, with larger ranges conferring mating benefits on males, while another explanation...

Previous research using the Morris water maze (a virtual environment navigation task adapted from the animal spatial cognition literature) has established a reliable sex difference in the ability to return to a hidden target, notably in the use of distal (far) cues. Building on this large body of work, the current study focuses on the strategies th...

Uncertainty represented in visualizations is often ignored or misunderstood by the non-expert user. The National Hurricane Center displays hurricane forecasts using a track forecast cone, depicting the expected track of the storm and the uncertainty in the forecast. Our goal was to test whether different graphical displays of a hurricane forecast c...

There are mixed findings with respect to individual or gender differences in virtual Morris water maze tasks, which may be attributed to variations in the scale of the space, the cues provided, and differences in spatial navigation experience and abilities. We explored the influence of environmental scale, cue-context, and individual differences on...

Abstract Sex differences in range size and navigation are widely reported, with males traveling farther than females, being less spatially anxious, and in many studies navigating more effectively. One explanation holds that these differences are the result of sexual selection, with larger ranges conferring mating benefits on males, while another ex...

In this extended abstract we establish the need for better ecological validity in evaluating the visualization of uncertainty information. Using weather forecasting as a framework, we also discuss the both the design and results for a pilot user-study that attempts to evaluate the effect of uncertainty visualizations in decisions.

Understanding how people interpret and use visually presented uncertainty data is an important yet seldom studied aspect of data visualization applications. Current approaches in visualization often display uncertainty as an additional data attribute without a well-defined context. Our goal was to test whether different graphical displays (glyphs)...