So I recently published a research article comparing two input methods—touchscreens and the humble computer mouse—on a task called visual foraging. It’s a fancy way of saying “looking for stuff on a screen.”

Most psychology research focuses on finding a single thing in a scene, like a Where’s Waldo puzzle, but in real life, we often search for multiple things at once. Think grocery shopping or organizing your desk. To mimic this in a lab, we used a touchscreen-based task where participants had to find and “cancel” multiple targets by tapping them on the screen.

The thing is, not everyone has access to fancy touchscreens, so we wanted to see how a good old-fashioned mouse would hold up in the same task. We put both methods head-to-head in terms of speed and accuracy.

The Results? Participants with touchscreens are faster—by about 65 milliseconds on average. That’s not huge, but it’s noticeable. However, the computer mouse still performed really well, especially in tougher tasks where you had to search through a lot of items. The mouse was more consistent across different types of searches, and surprisingly, there wasn’t a massive disadvantage to using it compared to touch input.

Why Does This Matter? We’re always looking for the best ways to measure attention in psychology experiments. And while touchscreens are intuitive, it turns out the trusty mouse is still a solid tool, even in these modern multitasking scenarios. So, researchers who don’t have fancy gear can still get great results with just a mouse.

Want the deep dive into the science? Check out the full article here:

Sauter, M. (2024). Speed and Reliability of Touch vs Mouse Inputs in Visual Foraging. Open Psychology, 6(1), 20240001. https://doi.org/10.1515/psych-2024-0001

That’s it—no lab coat required!