Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The work presented in this paper explores the amount of effort, defined by cognitive load, needed to understand depthvisualization while navigating a virtual space in the context of planning for image guided surgery. In this context, cognitiveload is evaluated by measuring brain activity through event-related electroencephalography (EEG). We found a significantdifference between dynamic depth cue renders versus statically rendered cues. The work presented here demonstrates theusefulness of EEG as an acceptable and efficient method to inspect brain activity for future user studies in the operatingroom, and that cognitive load can serve as an objective measure of visualization effectiveness.