Abstract

New information technologies always offer new and fascinating options for information presentation, especially for visualisation. But all these technical options have to take into account the capability of the human being. Therefore, the basic purpose of this contribution is to stress the importance of interdisciplinary integration of the findings from technological and human sciences in order to establish an appropriate fit of technology and human operator. Static and dynamic visualisation is a well-known and often-used means to support information processing. Visualisations are of different nature: They can be similar, logic or analogue visual representations of an abstract or concrete 'object'. When applying visualisations, presentation technology offers a vast amount of very attractive options. These pertain to the qualitative and quantitative features of visualisation, e.g., amount and details of information, use of colours and forms, presentation speed, degree of abstraction, use of fonts etc. However, there seem to be much more technological options than necessary for the human perceptual and cognitive system. Some of these options can be even detrimental to human perception and information processing. In order to exploit visualisation in an efficient way, several mechanisms of perception and cognition have to be taken into consideration. In this contribution the author addresses selected mechanisms of perception and cognition in order to illustrate their significance for computer visualisation. Einleitung (geändert)