Isolating the impact of a visual search template’s color and form information on search guidance and verification times

Visual search can be guided by biasing one’s attention towards features associated with a target. Prior work has shown that high-fidelity, picture-based cues are more beneficial to search than text-based cues. However, typically picture cues provide both detailed form information and color information that is absent from text-based cues. Given that visual resolution deteriorates with eccentricity, it is not clear that high-fidelity form information would benefit guidance to peripheral objects – much of the picture benefit could be due to color information alone. To address this, we conducted a search task with eye-tracking that had four types of cues that comprised a 2 (text/pictorial cue) × 2 (no color/color) design. We hypothesized that color information would be important for efficient search guidance while high-fidelity form information would be important for efficient verification times. In Experiment 1 cues were a colored picture of the target, a gray-scaled picture of the target, a text-based cue that included color (e.g., “blue shoe”), or a text-based cue without color (e.g., “shoe”). Experiment 2 was a replication of Experiment 1, except that the color word in the text-based cue was presented in the precise color that was the dominant color in the target. Our results show that high-fidelity form information is important for efficient verifications times (with color playing less of a role) and color is important for efficient guidance, but form information also benefits guidance. These results suggest that different features of the cue independently contribute to different aspects of the search process.