Show or Tell? Visual and Verbal Representations Bias Position Recall

Abstract: When we view visualizations, we not only have a visual representation of the data, but also a verbal one. Recent work has shown that these visual representations of data can be biased, such that the position of a line in a chart will be consistently underestimated. But are the verbal representations of position encodings also biased in the same manner, or is this a purely visual bias that can be mitigated with verbal context? We explored the bias in position reproductions for simple uniform lines for both visual and verbal representations. We find that the direction of the bias changed depending on the response modality, with visual reproductions showing a position underestimation while verbal responses showed overestimation. This finding indicates that, even for simple line charts, biases are still present for both visual and verbal representations, although the directionality of this bias depends on the modality.