A visual discrimination task for symbols in air traffic management

Abstract

The present study explored the effectiveness of different symbol features in facilitating participants' ability to extract important information in visually-cluttered displays. Participants were presented with arrays of visual symbols consisting of a number of visual targets amidst distractor symbols. The participants had to decide as quickly and accurately as possible whether there were more targets or more distractors present in the array. Symbol features (color, fill, letter, and shape) were varied on a block-to-block basis, while set size and ratio of targets to distractors (easy/20:80 or difficult/40:60) were varied on a trial-by-trial basis. The results of this experiment revealed that search based on color gave rise to the best performance, while search based on shape gave rise to the worst performance. When selecting features that might aid in the rapid extraction of important air traffic information, the results of the present study suggest that the use of color coding may be most effective. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.