Short-Term Effects of Graphical versus Textual Visualisation of Variables on Program Perception
Seppo Nevalainen, Jorma Sajaniemi · PPIG · 2005
The empirical evaluation of program visualisation has been based mostly on observations of long-term effects of the program visualisation tools, while possible short-term effects of the visualisations and their relation to the long-term effects have been elided. In order to study short-term effects of visual- isation of variables in a context where the long-term effects are already known, we conducted a controlled experiment, in which we investigated how a person targets her visual attention and what kind of a mental model she constructs, when variables are presented either textually or graphically. The results indicate clear differences in the targeting of visual attention between the visualisation tools: With the graphical tool, the participants targeted their visual attention to vari- ables much more than with the textual tool. With the graphical tool, the increase of visual attention to variables increased the proportion of high-level information in program summaries and decreased the proportion of low-level code-related information.