Evaluating Pictographic Symbols: An Automotive Application

Fifty university students participated in a laboratory experiment which examined 19 pictographic symbols previously used or proposed for labelling automobile controls and displays. Association norms, measures of familiarity, and magnitude estimates of the symbols' communicativeness were collected. Twenty of these subjects also participated in a paired-associate learning task and a two-alternative, forced-choice reaction-time task in which they made same-different judgments in response to verbally presented symbol labels followed by visually presented pictograms. It was found that, in general, the relative order of merit for the individual symbols was not consistent across tasks. Specifically, ratings of communicativeness were found to be well correlated with associative strength and to a lesser extent with reaction time, but associative strength was only weakly correlated with reaction time. Ease of learning was found to be an independent measure.