Remembering Advance Cues During Searching

A classification is given of the various ways in which advance information may be displayed to help performance, and a distinction is drawn between two kinds of work. These are tasks in which advance information (1) always remains on view until after action has been taken, and (2) is displayed but must be memorized, because it disappears before action is required. A particular laboratory task of order search has been studied; this has the advantage that the facts needed for a series of decisions are displayed all the time, and therefore do not need to be remembered. But such a display also has the disadvantage that information needed for use at the moment cannot easily be selected from many other details. Visual searching can be greatly simplified by providing additional advance cues which emphasize in turn each objective as it requires attention. However, if these advance cues point to objectives which are too far ahead, once again difficulties arise in the memorizing of these extra cues. The experiments described below investigated the size of the advance store , which was the number of advance cues which could be memorized at any given instant for successful work; this advance store did not include any advance cues currently on the display. Studies of the advance store demonstrated that serial work greatly reduced the normal immediate memory span. Only two advance cues could be memorized to help subsequent performance at slow working speeds, and at fast speeds only one such cue could be remembered. The advance time was also much less with the faster work. The limiting factor for anticipation span at the fast speeds was apparently the time available for perception and memorizing. In keeping with this was the further result that grouping the advance cues together in time gave better performance, and some of the possible reasons for this have been discussed

Action (physics) · Cognitive psychology · Cue-dependent forgetting · Memorization · Point (geometry) · Sensory cue · Task (project management) · Visual Search · Communication · Computer Science · Design Education and Practice · Human-Automation Interaction and Safety · Psychology

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