Evaluating Pictographic Symbols: An Automotive Application

Fifty university students participated in a laboratory experiment which examined 19 pictographic symbols previously used or proposed for labelling automobile controls and displays. Association norms, measures of familiarity, and magnitude estimates of the symbols' communicativeness were collected. Twenty of these subjects also participated in a paired-associate learning task and a two-alternative, forced-choice reaction-time task in which they made same-different judgments in response to verbally presented symbol labels followed by visually presented pictograms. It was found that, in general, the relative order of merit for the individual symbols was not consistent across tasks. Specifically, ratings of communicativeness were found to be well correlated with associative strength and to a lesser extent with reaction time, but associative strength was only weakly correlated with reaction time. Ease of learning was found to be an independent measure.

[1]  R. E. Walker,et al.  Comparative accuracy of recognizing American and international road signs. , 1965, The Journal of applied psychology.

[2]  S. S. Stevens.  The surprising simplicity of sensory metrics. , 1962 .

[3]  M. G. Lloyd,et al.  EFFECTIVENESS OF VARIOUS HIGHWAY SIGNS , 1935 .

[4]  Edwin H. Elkin,et al.  Design and interpretability of road signs. , 1961 .

[5]  J Markowitz.  AN INVESTIGATION OF THE DESIGN AND PERFORMANCE OF TRAFFIC CONTROL DEVICES , 1968 .

[6]  Daniel D. Jack.  Identification of Controls - A Study of Symbols , 1972 .

[7]  B W Marsh,et al.  IMPROVEMENT IN HIGHWAY SAFETY , 1933 .

[8]  William C. Howell,et al.  Population stereotypy in code design , 1968 .

[9]  Reinhard Lendholt.  Identification of Symbols and its Influence on Training for Motor Vehicle Controls , 1974 .

[10]  S. S. Stevens.  Issues in psychophysical measurement. , 1971 .

[11]  Detlef Frank,et al.  Identification of Symbols for Motor Vehicle Controls , 1973 .

[12]  P. D. McCormack.  Identification of Vehicle Instrument-Panel Controls , 1974 .

[13]  W. Holtzman.  Fundamental statistics in psychology and education. , 1951 .

[14]  M. Cahill,et al.  Interpretability of graphic symbols as a function of context and experience factors. , 1975 .

[15]  J. P. Guilford,et al.  Fundamental statistics in psychology and education, 3rd ed. , 1956 .

[16]  O S ADAMS,et al.  Relations among some measures of pattern discriminability. , 1954, Journal of experimental psychology.

[17]  H A Swanson,et al.  RECOGNITION OF TRAFFIC-CONTROL SIGNS , 1972 .

[18]  Charles N. Cofer,et al.  Associative indices as measures of word relatedness: A summary and comparison of ten methods , 1963 .

[19]  Robert Karsh,et al.  DESIGN OF A PICTURE LANGUAGE TO IDENTIFY VEHICLE CONTROLS. 1. GENERAL METHOD. 2. INVESTIGATION OF POPULATION STEREOTYPES , 1961 .

[20]  Elizabeth A. Heard.  Symbol Study - 1972 , 1974 .