Influence mechanism of icon semantics on visual search performance: Evidence from an eye-tracking study

Explicit icon semantics can reduce the difficulty of understanding complex visual information. Optimizing the icon semantics and text semantics of icons can effectively improve the cognitive performance of digital interfaces. This paper adopts visual search tasks to study the effects of different combinations of icon semantic familiarity and the presence or absence of text on icon search performance under horizontal and vertical layouts. The behavioral experiment results show that under two layouts: 1. The main effect of icon semantics is significant, and the search performance increases with the increase of semantic familiarity. 2. The main effect of text is significant, and the search performance is negatively correlated with the addition of text. The eye movement experiment found that the semantic familiarity of icons had a significant impact on average fixation time. Furthermore, the number of fixation points changed significantly after the text variable was added. Therefore, there was no significant difference in the number of fixation points in the horizontal layout, and icon semantics was the main influencing factor in visual search. In the vertical layout, there was no significant difference in average fixation time, and text was the main influencing factor of visual search. The results show that the semantic familiarity of icons and different combinations with or without text significantly affect visual search performance in horizontal and vertical layouts. This paper provides a theoretical reference for the combination of icons and text in interface design.