Semantic Research of Military Icons Based on Behavioral Experiments and Eye-Tracking Experiments

As a type of symbol, there are four dimensions in icons’ symbolic interpretation, namely semantic, syntactic, contextual and pragmatic dimension. Among those dimensions, semantic dimension is the most important one in user’s cognitive analysis. Based on the representation of semantics, icons can be classified into four types, namely function-metaphor, operation-metaphor, object-metaphor and meaning-metaphor icon. Here we conducted behavioral experiment and eye-tracking experiment to evaluate those four types of icons selected from military aeronautical system. The behavioral experiment showed that subjects have lowest reaction time to function-metaphor icons and highest accuracy to identify object-metaphor icons. The eye-tracking system showed that subjects have the most fixations when searching for object-metaphor icons and the least fixations when searching for function-metaphor icons. Our research is the first endeavor into the investigation of human’s response to different types of icons in the military systems and thus provided novel and valuable guidance to the design of icons in those systems.