Table 1 Important factors that might hinder or improve the understanding of time scales
Difficulties associated with understanding time in general | Ways to address the difficulty (or factors that can facilitate understanding of time) |
|---|---|
a. Time is an abstract concept which has to be conceptualized in other domains | Time is usually visualized as space and concretized as spatial distances (Boroditsky 2000; Lakoff and Johnson 1999) |
b. Evolutionary time is a highly abstract concept which is hard to conceptualize since it is unfamiliar to human experience | Evolutionary time can be metaphorically mapped to familiar and concrete objects such as calendars, clocks, distances along a path or as timelines (Catley and Novick 2009; Hidalgo et al. 2004) |
c. Shifts in scales (e.g. temporal scales) are hard to grasp. There is a tendency to underestimate the size of very large numbers and to over-estimate the size of very small numbers | An alternative to bridge gaps between different scales is bootstrapping, (i.e. using the full magnitude of one scale and linking it to a fraction of another scale) to relate the scales (Lee et al. 2011) |
Difficulties associated with the design of temporal information in animations | Ways to address the difficulty (or factors that may improve understanding of time in animations) |
|---|---|
d. The explicit temporal information in a visual representation can contribute to cognitive load if it splits attention and competes with the process depicted | Addressing cognitive load by considering established design principles around starting, stopping and replaying the animation (Kraak et al. 1997; Mayer and Moreno 2003; Peterson 1999) |
e. The narrative structure of an animation can be skewed due to an uneven distribution of events since usually more is known about the recent past than the distant past causing an uneven distribution of known events or processes | One way of addressing this problem is to use multiple external representations (Ainsworth and VanLabeke 2004). Another option is to use a variable representation either of the animated “time rate” or the spatial representation of time, that is with variable time units (Vít and Bláha 2012) |
f. The use of visualizations that alter the speed of changes can reinforce the tendencies to underestimate the size of very large numbers and to over-estimate the size of very small numbers | Avoid visualizations that alter the speed of changes (Lee et al. 2011) |