Informing the Design of a Neuroscience Experiment by Exploring the Evolution of Indirect to Direct Relations Between Topics in Augmented Reality Using a Timeline

Topic-based literature exploration in Augmented Reality (AR) has successfully been used to support neuroscientists in obtaining an overview of the literature, which is a tedious and time-consuming task needed to design expensive neuroscientific experiments. In particular, topic-based literature exploration in 3D AR allows users to analyse large numbers of publications simultaneously, providing a “bird’s-eye” view of relations between neuroscience topics. A direct relation exists when two topics, such as a brain region and a brain disease, co-occur in the same sentence of a publication’s title or abstract. An indirect relation occurs when no direct relation exists, but each topic co-occurs with a common intermediate topic, such as a gene. Neuroscientists have suggested that understanding how historical indirect relations evolved into current direct ones (1) increases confidence in the usefulness of current indirect relations and (2) informs the design of their experiments. Using a user-centred design approach, we establish if such a timeline-based exploration is indeed useful. We interview neuroscientists to verify the usefulness of exploring the evolution of indirect to direct relations, identify required functionality, and design and implement a timeline visualisation in 3D AR. Twelve neuroscientists carried out two representative tasks using the implemented functionality and timeline visualisation. Responses to 13 semi-structured interview questions and 10 Likert-scale questions indicated that (a) the timeline visualisation is suitable for presenting the implemented functionality, (b) the functionality is useful for exploring the evolution, and (c) exploring the evolution of indirect to direct relations is useful for designing experiments.