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This paper describes a study which employed eye tracking to investigate visually searching lists. An experiment was designed to test if “cognitive style” influences search strategies. We examined the search patterns of subjects as they viewed lists of sorted and randomly ordered columns. We found that cognitive style was a good predictor of the scanning strategies of ordered lists. For the unordered lists, efficient, systematic searching was performed by college students but not by high school students.
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Crosby et al. (1991) studied this question.
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