People routinely rely on data to make decisions, but the process can be riddled with biases. We show that patterns in data might be noticed first or more strongly, depending on how the data is visually represented or what the viewer finds salient. We also demonstrate that viewer interpretation of data is similar to that of 'ambiguous figures' such that two people looking at the same data can come to different decisions. In our studies, participants read visualizations depicting competitions between two entities, where one has a historical lead (A) but the other has been gaining momentum (B) and predicted a winner, across two chart types and three annotation approaches. They either saw the historical lead as salient and predicted that A would win, or saw the increasing momentum as salient and predicted B to win. These results suggest that decisions can be influenced by both how data are presented and what patterns people find visually salient.

翻译：人们通常依赖数据做出决策，但这一过程可能充满偏见。我们证明，数据中的模式可能被首先或更强烈地注意到，这取决于数据如何被视觉呈现，或者观察者认为哪些特征显著。我们还表明，观察者对数据的解读类似于"歧义图形"——即看着相同数据的两个人可能得出不同的决策。在我们的研究中，参与者阅读描述两个实体之间竞争的可视化图表，其中一个实体（A）具有历史领先优势，但另一个实体（B）势头正劲。参与者需预测获胜者，涉及两种图表类型和三种标注方法。他们要么将历史领先视为显著特征而预测A获胜，要么将势头增强视为显著特征而预测B获胜。这些结果表明，决策既受数据呈现方式的影响，也受人们认为哪些模式视觉上显著的影响。