ABSTRACT
A repeated claim for Visual Analytics is it can help analysts gain ‘insight’ into the problem that they are facing (Thomas and Cook, 2005; Pousman et al., 2007). Insight has long been a subject of debate in Cognitive Psychology, i.e., does insight arise as a sudden ‘ah-ha’ realisation of the solution to a problem or is it the gradual piecing together of disparate information? (Bowden et al., 2005). Klein (2013) suggests that insight arises in response to one or more of five ‘triggers’: contradictions, coincidences, connections, curiosity, creative desperation. In his examples, people with experience in their work domain ‘see’ a particular solution that was not apparent to their colleagues.
