How the Preattentive Process is Exploited in Practical Information Visualization Design: a Review

This review aims to analyze the recent literature to find how the preattentive visual process is currently used in information visualization, particularly to improve the cognitive process in chart comprehension (i.e., perceptual effectiveness). The purpose of our literature review is to provide an overview of how concepts related to the preattentive process are used pragmatically in recent research. We searched different bibliography sources between 2010 and 2021, getting 29 articles that fit the review focus. In general, we discovered that the research work on exploiting the preattentive process in information visualization is currently not thoroughly explored. The main contribution of the paper is the analysis of the papers, from which we identified two categories of research directions according to the primary uses of preattentive concepts: “preattentive attributes as design components,” and “the preattentive process as a measuring tool,” with a gap between these two approaches. The review also highlighted two limitations in the current research literature: most works tend to focus on a particular chart type, only, with difficult to generalize results, and the manipulation of preattentive attributes is done implicitly, without providing to the graph designer the suitable awareness over the design decisions impact. We finally present a proposal about how to use the knowledge about the preattentive process in the first stages of design in information visualization to start closing the gap mentioned above with the graph designer.