For web page designers it is important to consider how the visual components of a page affect how easy it is to use. Visual salience and clutter are two bottom-up factors of stimuli that have been shown to affect attentional guidance. Visual salience is a measure of how much a given item or region in the visual field stands out relative to its surroundings, and clutter is a measure of how much visual information is present and how well it is organized. In this study, we examined the effects of visual salience and clutter in a visual search task in e-commerce pages. Clutter was manipulated by adding grids of varying densities to the background of stimuli. On each trial, participants searched for an item that was either the most or least salient of the items on the page as determined by a computational model of visual salience (Itti, Koch, & Niebur, 1998). The results showed that the high salient targets were found faster than the low salient targets and search times also increased as clutter increased, but these two factors did not interact. We conclude that designers should consider both factors when possible.
Development of attentional guidance based on memory for infants in visual search
