Didn't expect to see my paper on the front pages of HN today :)<p>Lane (first author) here -- happy to take questions on behalf of the co-authors.<p>xangg already pointed out the nice followup from Matthew Kay and Jeff Heer (<a href="https://idl.cs.washington.edu/files/2015-BeyondWebersLaw-InfoVis.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://idl.cs.washington.edu/files/2015-BeyondWebersLaw-Inf...</a>).
I'll also direct folks to Ron Rensink's original paper and his several followup papers targeting the underlying mechanisms of correlation perception (<a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=s_5xXxQXpU0C&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate" rel="nofollow">https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=s_5xXxQXpU0C...</a>)
One thing they did right with this study and paper was to make the data public, which allowed a better analysis to be published the following year. See <a href="https://idl.cs.washington.edu/files/2015-BeyondWebersLaw-InfoVis.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://idl.cs.washington.edu/files/2015-BeyondWebersLaw-Inf...</a>