Information search: the intersection of visual and semantic space

In the context of an information search task, does the visual salience of items interact with information scent? That is, do things like bold headlines or highlighted phrases interact with local semantic cues about the usefulness of distal sources of information? Most research on visual search and highlighting has used stimuli with no semantic content, while studies on information search have assumed equal visual salience of items in the search space. In real information environments like the Web, however, these things do not occur in isolation. Thus, we used a laboratory study to examine how these factors interact. The almost perfectly additive results imply that good information scent cannot overcome poor visual cues, or vice versa, and that both factors are equally important.