How might the rules that govern visual search constrain the design of visual displays? Society for Information Display

In visual search attention can be guided toward a target item among distracting items by a limited set of basic features. This talk will summarize the rules of effective guidance (e.g. you can efficiently guide attention toward a red and vertical item but not a red and green item). Humans are good at searching for things in a crowded visual world. Once, we searched the savannah for predators and prey. Today, we search the cabinet for a mug, the countertop for the coffeepot, and the refrigerator for the cream. Moreover, we create stimuli for others to search through- from web pages to medical images to panels of instrumentation. The rules, forged over evolutionary time, apply to these searches of our own time. The purpose of this paper is to review some of those rules in the hope that knowledge of the limits on human search will help in displa