The Effect Of Stimulus Complexity And Similarity On Eye-controlled Highlighting In Visual Search

How to present visual information effectively is one of the crucial subjects in engineering psychology. Eye-controlled highlighting technology, based on information presentation technology and gaze-controlled technology, has been proposed recently to solve the problem. To further understand the characteristics and pattern of this technology, the present study examined the effect of stimulus complexity and similarity on eye-controlled highlighting in visual search task.The present study contained of three experiments: Experiment 1 adopted numbers and words as searching items, and investigated the effect of visual complexity on eyecontrolled highlighting; Experiment 2 adopted words with high similarity and low similarity as searching items, and investigated the effect of visual similarity on eyecontrolled highlighting. Experiment 3 applied eye-controlled highlighting into an actual searching situation, which is electronic map, and investigated the effect of eyecontrolled highlighting on map searching performance and workload.The study showed the following main conclusions:1. Eye-controlled highlighting technology helps to achieve better search performance;2. Stimulus complexity influences the effect of eye-controlled highlighting in visual search;3. Stimulus similarity influences the effect of eye-controlled highlighting in visualsearch;4. Eye-controlled highlighting technology leads to higher workload to some degree in map search;Based on our results, we proposed three principles for applying eye-controlled highlighting. First, the principle of complexity: apply this technology in displays containing high-complexity contents; second, the principle of similarity: apply the technology in displays containing high-similarity contents; third, the principle of workload: be aware of the potential of eye-controlled highlighting to cause higher workload.