Effect of Adaptive Guidance and Visualization Literacy on Gaze Attentive Behaviors and Sequential Patterns on Magazine-Style Narrative Visualizations

We study the effectiveness of adaptive interventions at helping users process textual documents with embedded visualizations, a form of multimodal documents known as Magazine-Style Narrative Visualizations (MSNVs). The interventions are meant to dynamically highlight in the visualization the datapoints that are described in the textual sentence currently being read by the user, as captured by eye-tracking. These interventions were previously evaluated in two user studies that involved 98 participants reading excerpts of real-world MSNVs during a 1-hour session. Participants’ outcomes included their subjective feedback about the guidance, and well as their reading time and score on a set of comprehension questions. Results showed that the interventions can increase comprehension of the MSNV excerpts for users with lower levels of a cognitive skill known as visualization literacy. In this article, we aim to further investigate this result by leveraging eye-tracking to analyze in depth how the participants processed the interventions depending on their levels of visualization literacy. We first analyzed summative gaze metrics that capture how users process and integrate the key components of the narrative visualizations. Second, we mined the salient patterns in the users’ scanpaths to contextualize how users sequentially process these components. Results indicate that the interventions succeed in guiding attention to salient components of the narrative visualizations, especially by generating more transitions between key components of the visualization (i.e., datapoints, labels, and legend), as well as between the two modalities (text and visualization). We also show that the interventions help users with lower levels of visualization literacy to better map datapoints to the legend, which likely contributed to their improved comprehension of the documents. These findings shed light on how adaptive interventions help users with different levels of visualization literacy, informing the design of personalized narrative visualizations.