Abstract
An efficient way to notify a set of people is to use a calling tree, where one person calls a few people who call others until everyone has been notified. Calling trees are typical of a large class of planning tasks that entail considering both the structure of agents and tasks in time. Participants were asked to choose the optimal diagram for a calling tree problem, and to compute the time needed to call everyone. Participants computed more accurately when the tree diagrams were scaled to represent elapsed time as well as the connection structure of the callers. In addition to efficiency, both gestalt factors and social equity considerations biased selection of the best diagram.
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Mason, D.L., Corter, J.E., Tversky, B., Nickerson, J.V. (2012). Structure, Space and Time: Some Ways That Diagrams Affect Inferences in a Planning Task. In: Cox, P., Plimmer, B., Rodgers, P. (eds) Diagrammatic Representation and Inference. Diagrams 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7352. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31223-6_28
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31223-6_28
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