Specifically, people can keep about four chunks of visual information in their short-term memory at a given time. This means that if we create a graph with ten different data series that are ten different colors with ten different shapes of data markers and a legend off to the side, we’re making our audience work very hard going back and forth between the legend and the data to decipher what they are looking at. As we’ve discussed previously, to the extent possible, we want to limit this sort of cognitive burden on our audience. We don’t want to make our audience work to get at the
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