Investigating the Role of Locus of Control in Moderating Complex Analytic Workflows

Abstract

Throughout the last decade, researchers have shown that the effectiveness of a visualization tool depends on the experience, personality, and cognitive abilities of the user. This work has also demonstrated that these individual traits can have significant implications for tools that support reasoning and decision-making with data. However, most studies in this area to date have involved only short-duration tasks performed by lay users. This short paper presents a preliminary analysis of a series of exercises with 22 trained intelligence analysts that seeks to deepen our understanding of how individual differences modulate expert behavior in complex analysis tasks.