Holistic peripheral processing of a polygon display

Polygon displays compress information that would otherwise be conveyed by separate indicators into a single display in which each reading is represented by the distance of a polygon vertex from its center. The effect on detection of fault states of varying the number of polygon vertices from 4 to 20 in a display presented peripherally around a dynamic, simulated flight display was studied. Presence of the dynamic task reduced both speed and accuracy of response to the polygon display but did not significantly affect the pattern of response to differing numbers of vertices. All measures of performance were better with larger numbers of vertices. If the vertices are processed serially, more vertices require more processing time. Therefore, the result argues for holistic processing and implies that such information integration is beneficial to human performance in fault detection.