The Effect Of Color Change On Implicit Location Memory Of Mobile APP Icon

Icon is the visual anchor of mobile applications(hereinafter referred to as “app”).A good app icon can transmit brand value and identity.As an important feature of mobile app icons,color reflects productions’ attributes and brand genes in a certain extent.In the process of product upgrading,designers often change the color of app icons to update and optimize users’ perception of the brand.However,will changing the color of the icons reduce the familiarity of the app icons,thus affect the efficiency of users in identifying and searching icons? This is the core issue of this research report.During the process of using mobile phones,users often do not consciously remember the location of an icon,but as the frequency of use increases,users become more familiar with the icon,thus improving the efficiency of search.This process is often based on implicit memory,the better the implicit memory effect,the higher the efficiency of search.Contextual cueing effect is a classic paradigm of spatial memory which usually requires subjects to complete visual search tasks.The stable relationship between spatial layout and target location can promote the speed of searching targets.In addition to spatial layout,the identity,color and other attributes of the stimulus can also be used as cues to promote the speed of searching targets.However,in previous studies,there are still no consensus on the impact of color changes on the contextual cueing effect.Therefore,this study using the contextual cueing effect paradigm to explore the influence of changing the icon color on implicit memory during the search using mobile phone.This study consists of the following three experiments,each of which includes a learning phase and a test phase.During the learning phase,participants learned the position of the target icon implicitly through repeated searches.During the first test phase,there were eight repeated configurations that had been learned and eight novel configurations that had never seen,to explore whether the participants had learned the contextual cueing effect.In the second test phase,changing the icon color to explore the impact of changing color on the contextual cueing effect,and thus examined the impact of changing the icon color on implicit memory of icon positions.Experiment 1 aims to explore whether change the app icons’ color randomly affects contextual cueing effect which had learned.30 college students were randomly recruited to investigate the effect of changing icon colors on implicit memory(about icons’ positions)by using a within-subject design.The participants were asked to search and click the target icon in the 16 icons displaying on the mobile phone screen.The learning phase includes 12 blocks,and 8configurations are repeated between blocks.The first test phase consists of 3 blocks,each of which is composed of 8 repeated configurations which has learned and 8 novel configurations which were generated randomly,to explore whether the subjects have learned the contextual cueing effect;the icon’s layouts of the second test phase in repeated configurations were same to the first test phase,but the colors of all icons change to new colors randomly.The results showed that there was a significant contextual cueing effect in the first test phase,but contextual cueing effect in the second test phase was significantly reduced,and the search efficiency was significantly reduced.Experiment 2 aims to explore whether changes colors in color combinations still have an impact on contextual cueing effect that had learned.Previous studies have suggested that if subjects have learned the spatial layout of icons by grouping based on color,they may ignore color information,and color changes may not affect the contextual cueing effect.Therefore,Experiment2 used a within-subject design,and recruited 32 college students to explore whether changing the color in groups of a color(for example,changing the red icon in the learning phase to purple in the second test phase)would affect the transfer of contextual cueing effect.The procedure of experiment 2 was the same as experiment 1,but in the second test phase,the spatial layout of the color combinations composed of the same color stimulus were changed.The results showed that the contextual cueing effect was significantly reduced and the search efficiency was significantly reduced after changing the colors of color combinations in the second test phase.Experiment 3 aims to further explore whether color is a sufficient condition for influencing the transfer of contextual cueing effects.If the color layouts kept unchanged but the icon identities are changed without affecting the transfer of contextual cueing effects,it can further prove the important role of color in the implicit memory of icon positions.31 college students were recruited randomly to explore whether the change of icon identities would have an impact on the contextual cueing effect through the contextual cueing paradigm using a within-subject design.Therefore,o experiment 3 kept the color layout unchanged but changed the corresponding icon identities in the second test phase.The results showed that the change of icon identities damaged contextual cueing effect,but did not affect the efficiency of icon search,which indicates that color plays a more important role in the implicit memory of icon position than icon identity.The study found that changing icon color can damage the contextual cueing effect that has learned,proving that color plays an important role in retrieval of icon position memory.Moreover,preserved the icons’ colors,then changed icon identities did not affect the efficiency of icon search,further proving that color plays a more important role in memory retrieval.Therefore,changing the color will damage the original icon position memory and affect the user experience.The study provides some insights into the impact of color on icon search efficiency.