Teaching and learning evolution is tainted by challenges, e.g. combining time scales of a huge difference. The aim of this exploratory study is to understand how different visual representations of time affect the perception of temporal aspects in an evolutionary process. The research questions addressed in this study are: How do different ways of representing time affect the way students perceive of events at specific times, order of events, time intervals and the ability to relate time intervals? Do different time representations give rise to different responses concerning interactivity? In this study, a visualisation designed as a map superimposed by animated areas representing the appearance, dispersal and disappearance of different species, or groups of species, in hominin evolution was used.
Three groups of participants were compared, each using variants of the visualisation, differing only in the way time was represented. The differences concerned whether the rate of time was constant or variable and whether there was one single timeline, or if several timelines with different scales were displayed. How the differences affected time perception, and interactions with the visualisation were analysed. Data were collected via a web questionnaire and screen-recordings complemented with quantitative data of the interactions on the computer. The difference between the groups performance were most pronounced concerning questions about events and intervals close to present time in the visualisation, especially estimations of time intervals and relating time intervals where the group using a visualisation with only one timeline performed poorest. The group which generally performed best used an animation featuring seve-ral timelines with different scales as well as a variable time rate. The most time-consuming questions involved estimations of time intervals and comparisons of time intervals. The group using the visualisation with a single timeline had the lowest frequency of interactions.