ArticleScientific reports2023
Trend judgment as a perceptual building block of graphicacy and mathematics, across age, education, and culture.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Initial organization and progressive expansion of the math-responsive brain network during the first school years.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Intuitions of mathematical curves in young children's drawings.Cognition · 2026Article
- Impact of Education and Music Training on the Development of Abstract Thinking in the First Years of Schooling.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- The superiority of graphics over text in long-term memory retention.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Origins of numbers: a shared language-of-thought for arithmetic and geometry?Trends in cognitive sciences · 2025Review
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Data plots are widely used in science, journalism and politics, since they efficiently allow to depict a large amount of information. Graphicacy, the ability to understand graphs, has thus become a fundamental cultural skill comparable to literacy or numeracy. Here, we introduce a measure of intuitive graphicacy that assesses the perceptual ability to detect a trend in noisy scatterplots ("does this graph go up or down?"). In 3943 educated participants, responses vary as a sigmoid function of the t-value that a statistician would compute to detect a significant trend. We find a minimum level of core intuitive graphicacy even in unschooled participants living in remote Namibian villages (N = 87) and 6-year-old 1st-graders who never read a graph (N = 27). The sigmoid slope that we propose as a proxy of intuitive graphicacy increases with education and tightly correlates with statistical and mathematical knowledge, showing that experience contributes to refining graphical intuitions. Our tool, publicly available online, allows to quickly evaluate and formally quantify a perceptual building block of graphicacy.
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