Performance of visual search tasks with common item configuration but with different screen sizes
DOI: 10.4992/pacjpa.74.0_2ev056
archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified
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Summary
This study investigates how screen size affects performance in visual search tasks when the item configuration remains constant. The research was motivated by prior findings indicating that visual search performance varies depending on whether the task involves searching for a target among distractors or searching for a distractor among targets. Specifically, the authors sought to determine if changing the screen size while maintaining the same spatial arrangement of items would influence these performance differences. The experiment involved eight participants who performed visual search tasks on two different screens: a small 17-inch CRT monitor (57 cm diagonal) and a large 80-inch plasma display (120 cm diagonal). The stimuli consisted of an 8x8 grid of items, with 16 items presented per trial. The task required participants to identify the presence or absence of a specific target item among distractors. Crucially, the angular size of the items differed between screens (2.7 degrees on the small screen vs. 6.3 degrees on the large screen), but the relative configuration remained the same. Participants completed 720 trials in total, with block order counterbalanced. The study analyzed reaction times and accuracy, categorizing trials based on the presence or absence of the target and the specific search condition. The results revealed no significant difference in reaction times between the small and large screens for the standard target-present condition ($t(91)=0.13, p>.05$). However, a significant difference was found in the distractor-search condition ($t(91)=2.08, p<.05$), where performance varied by screen size. Further analysis of reaction time distributions showed that while the overall mean reaction times for target-present searches did not differ significantly between the two small-screen blocks, the distribution patterns differed. Specifically, the small-screen conditions showed significant differences in certain distribution components, whereas the large-screen condition did not show significant differences between target-present and target-absent trials in the same manner. The data indicated that the impact of screen size on visual search performance is not uniform across all search types. The significance of these findings lies in the demonstration that screen size influences visual search performance even when item configuration is held constant, but this effect is specific to certain search conditions. The study suggests that the relationship between screen size and search efficiency is complex and depends on the nature of the search task (target vs. distractor search). This implies that previous assumptions about visual search performance may need to account for display characteristics, particularly in contexts where screen size varies but spatial layout remains fixed. The results contribute to the understanding of how visual display parameters interact with cognitive search processes.
Provenance
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| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | Crossref | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-11 |
| archive | success | canonical_url | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-25 |
| extract | success | pdftotext | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-26 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
| enrich | failed | — | — | — | 5 | 2026-07-05 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-11 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 1 | 2026-06-25 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 6 | 2026-06-26 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-25; verification: verified.
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