An Evaluation of Interaction Methods for Controlling RSVP Displays in Visual Search Tasks

Accurately identifying images with subtly varying features from a large set of similar images can be a challenging task. To succeed, viewers must perceive subtle differences between multiple nearly identical images and react appropriately. The Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) display technique has the potential to improve performance as it exploits our ability to preattentively recognize differences between images when they are flashed on a screen in a rapid and serial manner. We compared the speed and accuracy of three RSVP interface methods ("Hover", "Slide Show" and "Velocity") against a traditional "Point & Click" non-RSVP interface to test whether an RSVP display improves performance in visual search tasks. In a follow-up study we compared "Hover" and "Velocity" RSVP interface methods against a "Small Multiples" non-RSVP interface to explore the interaction of interface type and target size on visual search tasks. We found the "Hover" RSVP interface to significantly reduce the time it takes to perform visual search tasks with no reduction in accuracy, regardless of the size of the search targets. Beyond the gene identification task tested here, these experiments inform the design of user interfaces for many other visual search tasks.