Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

What are the cognitive processes in play when someone uses avisualization tool to interactively explore a new dataset? Here,we focus on one particular type of visualization—the scatterplot—which, despite (or perhaps because of) its simplicity, isstill one of the most frequently used plot types in many data-intensive disciplines. We conducted a pilot study to investigatehow expert astronomers interact with an unfamiliar dataset us-ing a visualization tool called Filtergraph, which supports rapidand easy visualization of large datasets. We present both quali-tative and quantitative results, including observations about thetemporal dynamics of visual data exploration as well as inter-esting behavioral patterns that we saw in our participants, suchas users taking “circular walks” through the data at various lev-els of abstraction.