The Use of Iambic Pentameter in the

Humans integrate many types of information during saccadic eye movement (Irwin,
Carlson-Radvansky & Andrews, 1995) including multiple object features like color and
orientation (Carlson, Covell & Warapius, 2001), surface and edge properties of items
(Gilchrist, Findlay & Heywood 1999) and lexical information (Inhoff & Tousman, 1990).
In many tasks, the fixations can be as short as 200 milliseconds (Trappenberg & Klein,
1999). This is a very brief amount of time to perceive the organization of information that
is displayed.
Consider the example of an airline pilot who must quickly scan information from
a series of monitors to determine altitude and speed information before making a decision
about landing. As an illustration, Figure 9 depicts a hypothetical interface arrangement
for a pilot in which two interfaces are adjacent. In this example, there are two interfaces
presented side by side. The interface on the left shows information about altitude while
that on the right shows speed information. The pilot’s task is to locate the ‘Current’
measurement of altitude and speed to make a decision about landing. To make her
decision, the pilot must quickly saccade across both interfaces to gather the relevant
information. In unlimited exposure product development conditions, the designers of
such interfaces use perceptual grouping to organize the information. These groupings are
designed to increase the efficiency of information search. But are these groupings optimal
for the time-limited eye saccades that take place during the pilot’s speeded information
search?
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