Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Two experiments revealed how non-experts interpret visualizations of positional uncertainty on GPS-like displaysand how the visual representation of uncertainty affects their judgments. Participants were shown maps with representations oftheir current location; locational uncertainty was visualized as either a circle (confidence interval) or a faded glyph (indicatingthe probability density function directly). When shown a single circle or faded glyph, participants assumed they were locatedat the center of the uncertain region. In a task that required combining two uncertain estimates of their location, the mostcommon strategy – integration – was to take both estimates into account, with more weight given to the more certain estimate.Participants’ strategies were not affected by how uncertainty was visualized, but visualization affected the consistency of theirresponses. The results indicate that non-experts have an intuitive understanding of uncertainty and that the best visualizationmethod is task dependent.