The Role of Metacognition in Understanding Deceptive Bar Charts

The cognitive processes involved in understanding and misunder-standing visualizations have not yet been fully clarified, even for well-studied designs, such as bar charts. In particular, little is known about whether viewers can improve their learning processes by getting better insight into their own cognition. This paper de-scribes a simple method to measure the role of such metacognitive understanding when learning to read bar charts. For this pur-pose, we conducted an experiment in which we investigated bar chart learning repeatedly, and tested how learning over trials was effected by metacognitive understanding. We integrate the findings into a model of metacognitive processing of visualizations, and discuss implications for the design of visualizations.