There is, however, an absence of information visualization efforts within the financial decision making arena. The purpose of our research is to establish a cognitive framework for the use of visualization within the problem representation component of financial decision making. The proposed study will be one of the few, if not the first, attempts to use scientific visualization tools for financial information visualization purposes. The establishment of such a framework would provide significant theoretical and practical contributions to the fields of information systems and accounting by outlining a conceptual model for the use of information visualization in the analysis of business data. Visualization can be applied to problem space construction to address attention and memory issues that affect the quantity and quality of information retrieved from long-term memory.
Visualization also provides a means to counter the limitations of short-term memory.
Scientific visualization tools provide a method to recode financial information into fewer and more meaningful units of information. Thus these tools can provide an efficient approach to recode large, complex data sets and to assist the accounting profession in overcoming information overload. Many scientific visualization tools allow the user to view the numerical form of the data, as well as view the visualization of the data, concurrently. The visualization of the data can also assist the decision maker in producing a mental representation of the problem set. The visualization achieved through these tools represents an encoded unit, rich in information, composed of multiple units of financial data.