Influencing visual judgment through affective priming.

Recent research suggests that individual personality differences can influence performance with visualizations. In addition to stable personality traits, research in psychology has found that temporary changes in affect (emotion) can also significantly impact performance during cognitive tasks. In this paper, we show that affective priming also influences user performance on visual judgment tasks through an experiment that combines affective priming with longstanding graphical perception experiments. Our results suggest that affective priming can influence accuracy in common graphical perception tasks. We discuss possible explanations for these findings, and describe how these findings can be applied to design visualizations that are less (or more) susceptible to error in common visualization contexts.