Fundamental differences in visual search with verbal and pictorial cues

Three experiments examined the effects of using informative verbal and pictorial cues on participants’ abilities to perform visual search. By providing participants with more time to encode the cues than had been used previously, all three experiments revealed long-lasting pictorially cued search advantages that stabilized over time. Experiments 1 and 3 demonstrated that searching for changing targets with pictorial cues was equivalent to searching for the same target over multiple trials in which target-switching costs would have been minimized. Experiment 3 additionally revealed that earlier evidence of pictorially cued search advantages was not due to inadequately equating the amount of information contained in the cues or uncertainty about when the search display would appear. Together, the data suggest that there are fundamental differences in the ability of participants to engage in visual search when the targets are identified with verbal, as opposed to pictorial, cues even when participants have sufficient time to fully encode the cues.

► Pictorial cues result in better visual search performance than verbal cues. ► Visual search performance with pictorial cues is equivalent to searching in optimal conditions. ► Early cue-type effects on visual search reflect effects on encoding processes. ► Later cue-type effects on visual search reflect effects on post-encoding processes. ► Verbal cues identifying a search target take approximately 800 ms to encode.