Three experiments examined how bottom-up and top-down processes interact when people view and make inferences from complex visual displays (weather maps). Bottom-up effects of display design were investigated by manipulating the relative visual salience of task-relevant and task-irrelevant information across different maps. Top-down effects of…

As part of the research carried out at the University of California, Santa Barbara's Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS), the Paper Authentication and Integrity Research (PAIR) project was launched. We began by investigating how one recent technology affected student learning outcomes. One aspect of this research was to study the…

A path-following experiment, using a global positioning system, was conducted with participants who were legally blind. On- and off-course confirmations were delivered by either a vibrotactile or an audio stimulus. These simple binary cues were sufficient for guidance and point to the need to offer output options for guidance systems for people…