The within-the-bar bias
A paper A day: Newman and Scholl discovered a cognitive asymmetry called the with-in-the-bar bias originated from the graphical asymmetry in the bar graph representation of mean.
APAD
Perceptual proxies for extracting averages in data visualizations
A paper a day: Yuan et al showed that when comparing averages across multiple data points, viewers use surprisingly primitive perceptual cues: the hierarchy of precision for perceptual encodings of data doesn’t hold for comparison of averages of even pairs of data.
Biased Average Position Estimates in Line and Bar Graphs
A paper a day: Xiong et al conducts experiments on estimating averages in line and bar graphs, in which they identified systematic perceptual biases.
The Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics, Psychology, and Neuroscience
A Paper a Day: The Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics, Psychology, and Neuroscience: studies in literature, music, and visual arts by Noël Carroll, Margaret Moore, and William P. Seeley
Toward a Science of Aesthetics
A Paper a Day: Toward a Science of Aesthetics by Arthur P. Shimamura