A number of human tasks involve information perception and processing in the man-machine systems and their performance is greatly influenced by information display format.
The purpose of this study is to analyze the variation of performance along with the display format and the number of displayed information. The impacts of various formats used in the design of visual displays are investigated in the points of response time and accuracy. Object display, bar graph display, and digital display are employed with numerical judgement tasks requiring either the integration or nonintegration of display elements.
This study examines the compatibility of proximity hypothesis of visual display design and proposes that an emergent features approch might carry more explanatory power.
Experimental results show that as a whole, the proximity compatibility principle is carried through out, but partially, a bar graph display is superior to an object display in an integration task because the bar graph can be processed both as a configural display and as a seperable display.