Perception of Symmetries in Drawings of Graphs

• Published in: Graph Drawing and Network Visualization Vol. 11282; pp. 433 - 446
• Main Authors: De Luca, Felice, Kobourov, Stephen, Purchase, Helen
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2018; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• ISBN: 9783030044138; 3030044130
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-04414-5_31

Symmetry is an important factor in human perception in general, as well as in the visualization of graphs in particular. There are three main types of symmetry: reflective, translational, and rotational. We report the results of a human subjects experiment to determine what types of symmetries are more salient in drawings of graphs. We found statistically significant evidence that vertical reflective symmetry is the most dominant (when selecting among vertical reflective, horizontal reflective, and translational). We also found statistically significant evidence that rotational symmetry is affected by the number of radial axes (the more, the better), with a notable exception at four axes.