The design and implementation of a visual analytics task to support experimental research on human reasoning with uncertain knowledge

This research project involved designing and implementing a web-based application to support research using visual analytics, or the use of interactive visualizations, to support human cognition. More specifically, the interactive visualization that was created was motivated by the problem that humans often express overconfidence in both judgments and predictions based on uncertain knowledge. The interactive visualization presents experimental participants with a series of binary (yes/no, T/F, etc.) general knowledge or prediction questions, and requires participants to answer these questions and also provide a probability or confidence estimate between 50% and 100%. The output of the software created is a quantitative measure of human performance in terms of both accuracy and latency. This web-based application, which can also be used in stand-alone (non-networked) mode, is expected to pave the way for a set of additional future research projects involving experiments with human participants, with the eventual goal of interface design approaches and guidelines for eliciting unbiased information from knowledgeable people when either their subjective knowledge or the judgment or prediction task itself is characterized by uncertainty