@inproceedings{LieglFritschTullius2015, author = {Liegl, Simone and Fritsch, Raphael and Tullius, Gabriela}, title = {Where Is Waldo? Visual search behavior in "Wimmelpictures"}, booktitle = {Re:inventing information science in the networked society : proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Information Science (ISI 2015), Zadar, Croatia, 19th - 21st May 2015}, editor = {Pehar, Franjo}, isbn = {978-3-76488-081-0}, doi = {10.5281/zenodo.17951}, institution = {Informatik}, pages = {320 -- 325}, year = {2015}, abstract = {In order to explore an image, the human eye functions like a spotlight, scanning the content from one object to the next. This visual search behavior is implemented with the help of attention control. The following work surveys the visual search behavior in "Wimmelpictures", a special type of busy pictures. The research objective is to analyze different search strategies and to work out possible differences concerning age and gender. The university experiment is carried out by an eye tracker that records the fixations and saccades of the test persons. The results indicate three forms of search strategy: based on a pattern, based on feature selection, or a mixture of both. Our data shows the search for special features of the target is the most successful. Furthermore there are no differences concerning gender but some concerning age. All age groups need more time to locate the target with an increasing number of distractors in the image. The size of the target is also relevant as a larger target is found more quickly than the smaller one.}, language = {en} }