Alvitta Ottley, PhD

Alvitta Ottley’s work demonstrates that visualization design can positively or negatively affect statistical reasoning and risk perception for medical decisions. For example, her team ran a study with a large-scale gambling game and found that visualization often resulted in riskier behavior than text-only. In another study, they used eye-tracking to compare how people reason with medical data in text-only and visualization formats and provided evidence that visualization makes it easier to identify necessary details. Her current work aims to isolate individual differences that affect decision-making with a focus on visualization literature and trust perception.