A Minimal Model for Predicting Visual Search in Human-Computer Interaction

Visual search is an important part of human-computer interaction. It is critical that we build theory about how people visually search displays in order to better support the users' visual capabilities and limitations in everyday tasks. One way of building such theory is through computational cognitive modeling. The ultimate promise for cognitive modeling in HCI it to provide the science base needed for predictive interface analysis tools. This paper discusses computational cognitive modeling of the perceptual, strategic, and oculomotor processes people used in a visual search task. This work refines and rounds out previously reported cognitive modeling and eye tracking analysis. A revised "minimal model" of visual search is presented that explains a variety of eye movement data better than the original model. The revised model uses a parsimonious strategy that is not tied to a particular visual structure or feature beyond the location of objects. Three characteristics of the minimal strategy are discussed in detail.