Individuals with developmental disabilities demonstrate deficits in intellectual and adaptive functioning that can include difficulty describing past events; accurate recall may be improved by learning to engage in precurrent, or problem solving, behavior. Visual imagining is a problem-solving strategy that involves seeing in the absence of the…

At the highest level, this dissertation is a case study on how bias can become encoded into the tools used to measure a construct and into the very definition of the construct itself. In this case, the construct is spatial ability. This dissertation focuses on the validity and accuracy of spatial tests and illuminates gender bias that is…

Biomedical research increasingly relies on the analysis and visualization of a wide range of collected data. However, for certain research questions, such as those investigating the interconnectedness of biological elements, the sheer quantity and variety of data results in rather uninterpretable--this is especially true for network visualization,…

In three experiments, I tested for the presence of the naming capability, the participants' drawing responses of the stimuli learned in the absence of the visual stimulus, and the participants' comprehension of texts with and without pictures present. In Experiment 1, I tested for the presence of naming and the drawing responses for the stimuli…

Tabular data is pervasive in the form of spreadsheets and relational databases. Although tables often describe multivariate data without explicit network semantics, it may be advantageous to explore the data modeled as a graph or network for analysis. Even when a given table design conveys some static network semantics, analysts may want to look…

The information visualization pipeline serves as a lossy communication channel for presentation of data on a screen-space of limited resolution. The lossy communication is not just a machine-only phenomenon due to information loss caused by translation of data, but also a reflection of the degree to which the human user can comprehend visual…