Abstract
The design pattern of a prohibition sign following the ISO standard includes a diagonal bar superimposed over a pictogram. However, there are some design variations on the relative position of the diagonal bar and the pictogram across different areas and contexts. This study evaluated how the position of the diagonal bar affected the recognition efficiency of prohibition signs. With a 2 (bar position) × 5 (familiarity) within-subject design, participants were asked to judge whether the prohibition signs and the textual explanation matched, both in an isolated context (Experiment 1) and in traffic scenes (Experiment 2). The results show that the response time was shorter for signs with the bar as the foreground, but only for the familiar signs displayed in an isolated context and only for the unfamiliar signs embedded naturally in traffic scenes. Overall, the findings indicated that designing the prohibition signs with the bar as the foreground may improve the efficiency of recognizing prohibition signs, even in traffic scenes.
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Data availability
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Notes
For simplicity, all comparisons in this study were made between signs with opposite bar positions: one with the bar as the foreground and one with the bar as the background, unless otherwise stated.
In the signs we tested in the following experiments, the average red area in the signs with the bar as the foreground is 12.65% (SD = 1.96%) of the total area inside the red circle, and 8.32% (SD = 2.58%) in signs with the bar as the background, this difference is significant (t = 10.34, p < 0.001).
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Funding
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant [31970998].
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Conceptualization: ML, XZ; Methodology: ML, XZ; Software: ML; Validation: XZ, GM; Formal analysis and investigation: ML, XZ; Data Curation: ML; Writing—original draft preparation: ML; Writing—review and editing: ML, XZ, GM; Visualization: ML, XZ; Funding acquisition: XZ; Resources: ML; Supervision: ML; Project Administration: ML, XZ.
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The study protocol was approved by the ethics review board of the Ethics Committee of School of Psychology at the Shaanxi Normal University (Approval No. HR 2020-07-001). We have obtained written informed consent from all study participants. All the procedures were performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and relevant policies in China.
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Appendix
Appendix
See Figs. 9, 10. As can be seen from Figs. 9, 10, the same sign can be evaluated differently by different participants in familiarity. Thus, we did not simply divide the signs into five groups according to the average or mode of the familiarity scores, but directly used each participant's raw score for each sign in the data analysis. This ensures that each sign is not forced into a familiarity group, but rather represents different familiarities as rated by different participants.
The results of the participants’ familiarity evaluation of all the prohibition signs in Experiment 1. (Familiarity: 1 = I have never seen this sign before, 5 = I often see this sign). The numbers on the bubbles are the frequency of the familiarity evaluation. Bigger bubbles mean more participants rated the sign as that level. The numbers below the prohibition signs represent the number of Chinese characters in the interpretation of each sign
The results of the participants’ familiarity evaluation of all the prohibition signs in Experiment 2. (Familiarity: 1 = I have never seen this sign before, 5 = I often see this sign). The numbers on the bubbles are the frequency of the familiarity evaluation. Bigger bubbles mean more participants rated the sign as that level. The numbers below the prohibition signs represent the number of Chinese characters in the interpretation of each sign
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Liu, M., Zhuang, X. & Ma, G. Should prohibition signs always be designed as bar-over-pictogram in traffic and non-traffic contexts?. Cogn Tech Work 26, 169–182 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-023-00743-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-023-00743-5