Information Displays for Medical Diagnosis

Abstract

The Proximity Compatibility Principle (PCP) states that a display format is well-suited to a given task if the information sources in the display are related to the same degree as information sources in the task. While experiments have shown that PCP can provide useful display design guidelines for many types of tasks, diagnosis tasks have not seemed to conform to PCP's predictions. The current experiment compared performance with integral, configural, and separable displays in three diagnosis tasks based on a medical diagnosis technique. As predicted, the integral display allowed the best performance. The results indicate that PCP is a useful theory for diagnosis tasks, but different diagnosis tasks can differ widely in their task demands.