Effects of Users’ Familiarity in Icons on the Cognitive Performance of Icon Identification

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of icon familiarity on visual search task and semantic information recall. First, participants need to search for target icons among 10 unfamiliar icons. The familiarity of the ten target icons is different, which is determined by the number of occurrences in the training stage. In the training stage, subjects are familiar with the ten icons and their semantics, and the number of occurrences of each icon is random. After the visual search task, participants first memorize the semantic information of the icon, and then recall the semantic information of the corresponding icon. The results showed that in the visual search task, the participants' response time was faster when the icons were more familiar.