Research On Graphic Symbols Design Recognition

As the information carrier, graphic symbol is widely used in road traffic public signage system、computer graphical user interface、various products and equipments etc. Research on graphic symbol design and recognition is not only helpful to improve graphic symbol’s cpability of information comunication, but also is favorable to formulate and perfect graphical symbol standard and promote city image construction of our country. This paper’s main contents of research and achievement have been shown as follows:The interaction between user and human-computer interface mainly include visual search and point-click operation, after analyzing a great number of graphical user interfaces, graphical panel layout characteristics based on graphic symbol was divided into graphic symbol size, panel structure, panel direction and screen position. Two groups of graphic symbol searching and clicking experiments were conducted to exploring the relationship between graphical panel layout characteristics and reaction time. The results show that smaller graphic symbol size and bigger ratio value of panel’s longer side and shorter side result in significantly raised reaction time; Reaction time is shorter for panel displayed on top screen than bottom screen, but has no difference between panel displayed on left and right; Relative to horizontal panel, reaction time is longer for vertical panel, and the difference of reaction time is greater when the ratio value of panel’s longer side and shorter side become higher. The result provided some ergonomics guidelines for graphical user interface design.Graphic symbol is an important composition element of signage system, taking the hospital signage system as the research object, the present status and problems of graphic symbols in hospital signage system was analyzed based on field investigation. The comprehensibility of current standard symbols for medical treatment and health care of our country was investigated, and based on the results, some symbols with lower comprehensibility were redesigned, and these redesigned symbols were also evaluated by another investigation.N400is one of the endogenic late components closely related to cognitive thinking of event-related potentials (ERPs) and it maily reflected the semantic processing. The corresponding relation of subjects’behavior characteristic and amplitude of N400and the effect of concreteness on graphic symbol comprehension was investigated by an experiment using picture-word repetition paradigm to judge if the graphic symbol and the presented word have the same meaning. The results showed that reaction times were longer and accuracy rates were lower for abstract graphic symbols than for concrete graphic symbols. In contrast with semantic mismatched conditions, reaction times were shoter and accuracy rates were higher when semantic matched. The ERPs results indicated that abstract graphic symbols elicit a small N400under semantic matched conditions, and both concrete graphic symbols and abstract graphic symbols elicit a lager N400when semantic mismatched. The N400amplitudes distributed in different brain areas exist obvious difference. This study indicated that graphic symbols concreteness significantly affect icon comprehension.Using naming task and scale-rating method, several recognition characteristics include visual complexity, familiarity, semantic distance, concreteness, H value and percentage of concept agreement of270graphic symbols was rated, and the correlation among these graphic symbols’recognition characteristics was analyzed and the results indicated:There was significant positive correlation between semantic distance and concreteness. A significant negative correlation was observed between familiarity and visual complexity. The familiarity showed relatively high positive correlation with semantic distance, concreteness and percentage of concept agreement. The percentage of concept agreement exhitited a significant negative correlation with visual complexity and H value, but showed a marked positive correlation with semantic distance and concreteness. The results suggested that familiarity is a very important influencing factors to graphic symbols recognition, it should be prior considered in graphic symbols design and cognitive study. On aspects of sevreal characteristics’ correlation, the results of our study is basically in accordance with that of other researchs. Comparison analysis results showed that Chinese subjects score to graphic symbols’ familiarity and concreteness is lower than that of English subjects. The results provided a standard experiment material for domestic graphic symbols recognition experiments.