When Visual Cues Help—and When They Hurt

What is it about?

Visual cues can help people find important information quickly, such as helping a pilot notice a runway hazard. This paper tested different ways of guiding people's attention and what happens when an automated system gives incorrect guidance. Automated cues that showed people more precisely where to look, as well as using two cues together, helped people find targets more quickly and accurately. However, incorrect cues could make performance worse than if no guidance were provided at all. These findings can help designers create safer and more effective automated and augmented reality guidance systems.

Featured Image

Photo by Oskar Kadaksoo on Unsplash

Photo by Oskar Kadaksoo on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Automated decision-support systems increasingly present visual guidance through head-up displays and augmented reality to direct attention in complex environments, but less is known about how cue design affects search performance, especially when these systems make errors. The findings of this paper show that more precise and combined cues can improve search, especially when important information is outside a person’s immediate view, but incorrect guidance can also impair performance. More broadly, the results show that stronger attention guidance can increase both the benefits of correct automation and the costs of incorrect automation. These findings advance research on attention, visual search, and human–automation interaction while providing practical guidance for designing safer attention-support systems.

Perspectives