Display clutter and its effects on visual attention distribution and financial risk judgment

Abstract

Display clutter is a widely studied phenomenon in ergonomics, where information density and other properties of task-relevant visualizations are related to effective user performance and visual attention. This paper examines the impact of clutter in the context of financial stock visualizations. Depending on their expertise, traders can use a variety of different cues to judge the current and future value of a stock and to assess its riskiness. In our study, two groups of participants (novices and experts) judge the riskiness of 28 pairs of stocks under two clutter conditions (low and high). Consistency of judgments and group concordance serve as measures for judgment performance, while mean fixation duration, fixation frequency, and transition matrix density are employed to capture visual attention. Our results reveal significant effects of display clutter and expertise on both the performance measures as well as the visual attention measures.

Keywords: Display clutter; Expertise; Eye-tracking; Stocks.