The aim of this workshop is to bring together people from a wide range of disciplines such as information visualisation, visual analytics, software engineering, cognitive psychology and decision science, as well as those close to end-user groups like intelligence analysts and medical practitioners, to explore some of the ways in which cognitive biases impact user performance and share ideas about practical ways to reduce or overcome these potentially harmful effects, especially in adapting the tools developers design and build.

Decisions, decisions, decisions. We make them all the time. But due to the vast amount of sensory and memory-derived data and limited ‘brain power’, humans have evolved simplifying rules to make ‘good enough’ decisions, quick enough. Most of the time this is fine, but sometimes, and especially  when faced with uncertainty, these rules can result in poor decisions without us being aware of the fact. These are called cognitive biases. Much investigative work has been done on this systematic behaviour in making judgments, although attempts to mitigate the often negative impact of cognitive biases have generally been unsuccessful. Now, with vast complex dataset to analyse, people make use of visual tools and sophisticated analytics and this workshop addresses the challenge of improving decision making by reducing the impact of these cognitive biases in the tools developers design and build. (see Cognitive Bias for more information and some examples)

We invite participants from a wide range of disciplines such as information visualisation, visual analytics, software engineering, cognitive psychology and decision science, as well as those close to end-user groups like intelligence analysts and medical practitioners, to explore some of the ways in which biases impact user performance and share ideas and experiences about practical ways to reduce or overcome these potentially harmful effects.