Visual Task Performance and Spatial Abilities: An Investigation of Artists and Mathematicians

This study builds on past research to present a domain-specific empirical investigation of artists and math & computer scientists on their respective relationships to, perceptions of, and interactions with data visualization. We conducted a three-phase study utilizing mixed-methods to investigate performance on visual and text representations of data between domains. Our findings evidenced how math & computer scientists are proficient utilizing text representations of data while artists benefit more from visual chart representations. Finally, we present perspectives from artists to gain an understanding of their approach to visual and mathematical tasks. Our findings indicate that artists are especially adept at statistical visual tasks and that development of cognitive skills could be fostered by individuals to potentially benefit visualization task performance.