Effects of cognitive redundancy on interface design and information visualization

Abstract

This paper investigated whether redundancy can be controlled by design and whether a rational redundant interface can improve the cognitive efficiency in information visualization. Redundancy is often mistakenly identified as overflow or completely unnecessary. This paper presents a concept of CR (Cognitive Redundancy) and divides CR into two kinds: the RP (Redundancy of Presentation) and RS (Redundancy of Structure) based on the cognitive process. The Discrete SWAT Technique was used to evaluate the mental workload and a behavioral experiment was conducted to access the cognitive performance. The control set was redesigned by high/low level of two RP (color redundancy and layout redundancy) and two RS (path redundancy and interaction redundancy). Based on the experiment results, it is validated that the cognitive efficiency of redundancy indeed significantly enhanced by controlling the different levels of the RP and RS separately.