Texture semantics is robust to scaling

Studies of visual semantics for information visualization aim to understand observers’ expectations about the meaning of visual features (e.g., color, texture) because visualizations that align with those expectations are easier to interpret. Previous work on visual semantics focused primarily on color, with the implicit assumption that color semantics is unaffected by changes in the size of the visualization (given sufficient perceptual discriminability across sizes). Changing size from small scale (e.g., small figures in a paper) to large scale (e.g., large figures in a slide presentation) is straightforward for visualizations that have solid colored regions, but can be more complicated for visualizations with heterogeneous textures because there are multiple ways to scale textures—zooming or repeating texture elements. Previous work suggested that original textures were more perceptually similar to repeat-scaled rather than zoom-scaled textures. Here, we found that texture semantics was preserved after both types of enlargement, suggesting that texture semantics is robust to scaling, at least for geometric textures in which elements are visible at all scales.