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Science 30 August 1985:
Vol. 229. no. 4716, pp. 828 - 833
DOI: 10.1126/science.229.4716.828
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Articles

Graphical Perception and Graphical Methods for Analyzing Scientific Data

William S. Cleveland 1 and Robert McGill 1

1 Statistical scientists at AT&T Bell Laboratories, 600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974.

Graphical perception is the visual decoding of the quantitative and qualitative information encoded on graphs. Recent investigations have uncovered basic principles of human graphical perception that have important implications for the display of data. The computer graphics revolution has stimulated the invention of many graphical methods for analyzing and presenting scientific data, such as box plots, two-tiered error bars, scatterplot smoothing, dot charts, and graphing on a log base 2 scale.


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