ABSTRACT
Introduction Highlighting menu options is usually regarded as effectively improving search performance. Recent evidence has suggested that the effect of highlighting cannot be conceptualized in such a uniform way. When highlighting is valid only in 50% of the search trials (half valid highlighting), a paradoxical relationship is
360 G. Philipsen
found: performance degrades under certain modes of target highlighting, but it does not with use of colour (Tan and Fisher, 1987; Fisher and Tan, 1989).