Effects of grouping and addressing methods on performance in a location task - investigation of grouping × addressing interaction

In this paper, the effects of the grouping and the addressing methods on the accuracy and the response time in a visual search task were investigated. Four grouping conditions (4, 8, 16 and 32 groups) and four addressing methods (random, ordered, cartesian and polar) were selected in the experiment. For each combination of grouping and addressing methods, subjects repeated the search task 30 times. No remarkable differences of the percent correct were observed both among the levels of grouping and among the addressing methods. The mean response time increased with the increase of the number of groups. Moreover, the interaction between addressing methods and grouping for both percent correct and response time was clarified.