The goal of the present study was to understand how buttons and images affect glance times for in-vehicletasks. Search tasks that simulated in-vehicle tasks (e.g., radio tuning, navigation) were used to measurethese effects. Participants across various age groups were required to select an item (e.g., “Mango”) oneach screen that matched a category of items (e.g., “Fruit) that was given at the beginning of the task. Forexample, a category of “fruit” would have targets of “strawberry” or “mango.” Glance times were collectedfor each screen to analyze the effects of the number of buttons and presence of images on the display.Additionally, the image detail was varied by using a generic graphic (e.g., polygons) and a photographicimage. A regression model showed that the image variable resulted in a small improvement to the “numberof buttons” model (ΔR2 = .005) but adding the “level of detail” variable (i.e., polygons or photograph) didnot. However, the significant effect of images reflected a decrease from the condition with no images.Further analysis showed that the screens with the images had similar variability to the ones without. Theseresults suggest that the effects of task irrelevant images are measurable and should be thought of as similarto other interface elements. Additionally, there does not appear to be a quality in images that causes higherglance time over and above other interface elements. The implications for distraction policy are discussed.
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