Abstract
<p>We engage in visual search in many daily activities, from hunting for keys to scanninga grocery list for missed items. A subset of these search tasks (e.g., looking through a grocerylist) additionally intersect with the process of reading, requiring the observer to recognize text asthey search for a target. In these settings, how do manipulations of text appearance, whichnormally affect reading performance, affect the visual search process? The present study uses amodified version of a real-world visual search task, typo detection, to examine how stimulus fontimpacts performance. One possibility is that hard-to-read fonts could hinder typo detection byeither impeding word identification or shifting quitting thresholds. Alternatively, hard-to-readfonts could, counterintuitively, facilitate typo detection by slowing the reader down and requiringmore effortful processing. Across two different experiments, participants searched for typos inblocks of text that varied in stroke contrast (Experiment 1) and letter width (Experiment 2).Across both experiments, font did not impact accuracy, but participants were slower to respondafter fixating typos written in hard- versus easy-to-read fonts. Hierarchical drift diffusionmodelling isolated the mechanism underlying this difference: in Experiment 2, the rate ofevidence accumulation was significantly lower for hard- versus easy-to-read trials, while non-decision time and decision threshold were unimpacted. These findings reveal that, though one’stypo detection performance may be robust to changes in text appearance, there are subtledifferences in the rate of processing stimuli that impact the time course of target identification.</p>