Naive Realism - Realistic displays can hurt performance

NEWSLETTER ARTICLE

Dr. Harvey Smallman of Pacific Science & Engineering presented some of his work on naive realism. This is the term the Dr. Smallman uses to describe the false belief that displays should attempt to be a window to the real-world, which, in his studies, is attempting to make aircraft representations look exactly like aircraft rather than symbols. Performance with the symbols was far superior to either 3D or 2D representations, despite the user preference for the latter.

Naive realism comes from a failure to understand how humans actually process information, in part because our information processing system has learned how to "trick" us over the course of our evolution. We think we observe everything in our view, which we don't. We think processing visual information is easy, as though our brain were just a screen to project an image on, which it isn't. We think we see the world as it is, when we don't.

Why would people tend to create displays that hamper performance? Spatial ability, measured by such things as being able to mentally rotate an image and describe how it would appear, may provide a clue. A recent study allowed meteorologists to create their own displays. The displays were then examined for what features were actually needed. Those meteorologists who had low spatial ability added more extraneous information than those with high spatial ability.

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