Does the human form provide an advantage for directing search and improving retention of information during web-based search?

Abstract

Humans tend to automatically mirror other humans’ actions or follow their gaze or body orientation. The direction of attention is very powerful between humans, may they be adults or infants, but also between other species such as non-human primates. This present study is focusing on the effects of biologically relevant cues (e.g., a human pointing and looking at a target object) as opposite to the effects of biologically irrelevant cues (e.g., an arrow, or, in our case, a trident). This thesis investigates those effects on adult human’s attention and memory. To do so, two different tasks are conducted. The first task is a cued visual search where the participants have to click on the cued item and then find the cheapest item amongst distractors (this target object may or may not be the one that was cued). The second task is a recognition memory task where the subjects are presented with two images and have to select the one they remember from the first task (this is a simple ‘old-new’ task). The results obtained are partially significant. They do not bring out any significant difference between the effects of human and non-human cues on attention and memory. These are consistent with some studies (Friesen and Kingstone, 1998; Ristic, Friesen & Kingstone, 2002; Newman-Norlund et al., 2010; Sato et al., 2010) that retrieved similar outcomes.