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MILSTD 2525 is a document that outlines the composition and use of a set of standardized symbology by the US Department of Defense to represent vehicles, equipment and personnel on tactical interfaces. These symbols are primarily multivariate glyphs that visualize the status of military units. This study selected a subset of commonly used glyph features in order to investigate their relative efficiency in a search paradigm. Performance across the different features as well as within levels of each feature was examined. Stimuli were tested using an oddball search paradigm with set sizes of 6, 12 and 18. The dependent variables of interest were search efficiency, RT, and accuracy. Results show that search asymmetries occur with MILSTD 2525 glyph features and that these features differ in search efficiency from one another. The authors discuss the relative search performance of these features and implications for glyph design.

Glyphs are graphical icons that depict multivariate data and are used by a number of disparate fields. Their designs are varied, reflecting both the diversity of applications and the absence of design standards. In the absence of guidelines, glyph designers have relied on their intuition and expert opinion to develop a diverse collection of idiosyncratic techniques for representing complex data sets. Importantly, it is not clear whether glyph design schemes are in any way optimal for efficient perceptual interpretation and usage. We note several findings in the perception and cognition literature that may serve as an initial basis for guidelines, we discuss how they might be used and the importance of doing so. Additionally, the dynamic updating of information in glyphs is a new trend that makes this kind of optimization necessary now more than has been in the past.

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