Flowers Revisited: A Preliminary Replication of Flowers et al. 1997

In 1997, Flowers, Buhman, and Turnage published a paper titled ``Cross-Modal Equivalence of Visual and Auditory Scatterplots for Exploring Bivariate Data Samples.'' This paper examined our capacity to assess the relationship between two data variables when presented through visual or auditory scatterplots. Twenty-seven years later, we have replicated the first part of this influential study and present the preliminary findings of our replication, initially involving 21 participants. In addition to purely auditory and visual scatterplots, we introduced audiovisual scatterplots as a third condition in our experiment. Our initial findings mirror those of Flowers et al.'s original research. With this extended abstract, we also aim to spark a discussion about the significance of replication studies for our research community in general.