Effects of Orthographic and Semantic Distractors on Visual Search for Single Words

Two experiments of visual search for a word within a list were designed. The goal was to assess the effects of the presence in the list of words either visually similar or semantically related to the target word. In experiment 1 (“literal” task), the participants were shown the target word in advance. In experiment 2 (“semantic” task), the target word was defined by a semantic clue. In the “literal” task, orthographic distractors resembling the target word strongly impacted the search, but there was also an effect of semantic associates. In the “semantic” task, orthographic distractors still had a stronger impact than semantic associates. Hence, the visual appearance of words would be a strong determinant of the efficiency of information search within documents even when what is searched for is not known precisely.