Comparison of Human Information Processing Performance with Dot and Stroke Alphabetic Characters.

摘要

Recent engineering developments have stimulated interest in the use of displays which will present alphanumeric information in dot format. In order to supply human factors data on how information presented in punctate form is processed, the Sternberg item recognition procedure was used and discrimination reaction time (RT) to both dot and stroke letters was determined under various amounts of memory load. In addition, the visually evoked response (VER) of the electroencephalogram was recorded during RT performance and compared as a function of symbology format. These results suggest that dot letters require slightly longer (less than 10 msec) to encode than stroke letters. However, subsequent to about 200 msec after the letter is presented, no statistically significant differences appear in either RT or VER data, suggesting that once the letter is encoded it is processed equally well whether the original format was dot or stroke. In addition, no evidence of increased work load, greater errors, or other performance decrement was seen with the dot format used here. Under the conditions tested, subjects were apparently able to compensate for the additional encoding time with little effort and with no demonstrable effect on overall performance.