Do oral messages help visual search?

A preliminary experimental study is presented, that aims at eliciting the contribution of oral messages to facilitating visual search tasks on crowded visual displays. Results of quantitative and qualitative analyses suggest that appropriate verbal messages can improve both target selection time and accuracy. In particular, multimodal messages including a visual presentation of the isolated target together with absolute spatial oral information on its location in the displayed scene seem most effective. These messages also got top-ranking ratings from most subjects.