Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Transcription with Incremental Presentation of the Stimulus (TIPS) is a novel approach relying on micro-behaviours proposed by Colarusso and colleagues (2023) to study users' cognition with data visualizations. The study in this paper has two primary objectives: (a) investigate whether TIPS can measure an individual's competence with data visualizations; and (b) explore the potential enhancement of TIPS measures by normalizing them with the individual's performance on tests of visuo-spatial abilities and memory capacity. We test 30 participants with different expertise and cognitive skills. Results reveal that TIPS provides some promise for individual competence assessment, but only when normalized with the individual's performance on a test of rigid transformation of mental images. Other tests measuring visuospatial abilities or memory capacity did not produce effective normalizations.