Boersema T, Zwaga H J
Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands.
Percept Mot Skills. 1996 Apr;82(2):355-65. doi: 10.2466/pms.1996.82.2.355.
It is not always easy to locate routing signs in the visually noisy environment of public buildings. Guidelines to ensure the conspicuity of an object in a complex field are not readily available. In two previous experiments, aiming to provide such guidelines for use in practice, the stimuli were simple simulations of scenes in public buildings, each containing a uniquely colored target (a routing sign) and a varying number of distractors (advertising signs). The results of these two experiments were opposite: in one experiment pop-out of the targets appeared as predicted by current theories of visual search, but in the other experiment performance significantly decreased when the number of distractors increased. Two new experiments are reported here to clarify this discrepancy. From the results it is concluded that pop-out of easy visual targets does not occur on the first few trials of a task. Subjects must have had sufficient practice for pop-out to develop. This finding implies that, contrary to what is common in experiments on visual search, short and heterogeneous series of stimuli should be used to ensure the practical relevance of the results for applications such as sign posting.
在公共建筑视觉嘈杂的环境中，找到导向标识并非总是易事。确保物体在复杂场景中醒目突出的指导原则并不容易获得。在前两项实验中，旨在提供此类可用于实际的指导原则，刺激物是公共建筑场景的简单模拟，每个模拟场景都包含一个颜色独特的目标（一个导向标识）和数量不等的干扰物（广告标识）。这两项实验的结果相反：在一项实验中，目标的弹出正如当前视觉搜索理论所预测的那样出现，但在另一项实验中，当干扰物数量增加时，表现显著下降。此处报告了两项新实验以澄清这一差异。从结果得出的结论是，简单视觉目标的弹出不会在任务的最初几次试验中出现。受试者必须有足够的练习才能出现弹出效果。这一发现意味着，与视觉搜索实验中的常见情况相反，应使用简短且多样化的刺激系列，以确保结果对于诸如设置标识等应用具有实际相关性。
