THE EFFECTS OF SCANNABILITY ON INFORMATION SEARCH: AN ONLINE EXPERIMENT.

One of the most important tasks of web-based inform ation retrieval and processing is searching. A large body of studies yielded that people, while foraging informa tion, do not read on-screen but rather scan. In the current study we try to elucidate the effects of salient items on re sponse time and answer accuracy in search tasks. In an online experiment we presented two text paragraphs, simila r to search engine results, asking the participants to d ecide as fast as possible whether the text is relevant for a given task or not. Each paragraph has been presented with a di fferent density of salient items (bold words). As dependent variables response time and answer accuracy have be en recorded. The results of this study show that the density of salient items has a clear impact on search efficien cy.