Adaptive but non-optimal visual search behavior with highlighted displays

Previous research Fisher, D. L., & Tan, K. C. (1989). Visual displays: The highlighting paradox. Human Factors, 31(1), 17–30] suggested that making certain items visually salient, or highlighting, can speed performance in visual search tasks. But interface designers cannot always anticipate users’ intended targets, and highlighting non-target items can lead to performance decrements. An experiment presented suggests that people attend to highlighting less than what an algebraic visual search model of highlighted displays Fisher, D. L., Coury, B. G., Tengs, T. O., & Duffy, S. A. (1989). Minimizing the time to search visual displays: The role of highlighting. Human Factors, 31(2), 167–182] predicts. Users adjust their visual search strategies by probability-matching to their visual environment. An ACT-R Anderson, J. R., Bothell, D., Byrne, M. D., Douglass, S., Lebiere, C., & Quin, Y. (2004). An integrated theory of the mind. Psychological Review, 111, 1036–1060] model reproduced the major effects of the experiment and suggests that learning in this task occurs at very small cognitive and time scales.