Visual attention and memory in professional traders

Professional traders need to process a large amount of visual information in their daily activity to judge how risky it is to trade specific investment products. Despite some studies investigating the effects of display clutter on traders, visual attention and memory were never investigated in controlled experimental tasks in this population. Following a preliminary study with 30 participants, visual selective attention and visual working memory were measured and compared between two groups of 15 traders and 15 non-traders (salespeople, acting as a control group) from a large-scale banking group in three experimental tasks measuring selective attention in complex visual contexts, simulating display clutter situations (Visual search), cognitive interference (Stroop task), and a delayed recall visual working memory task. In the Visual search task, traders displayed faster response times (RTs) than non-traders for small display sets, while their performance overlapped for large sets. In the Stroop task, traders showed faster RTs than non-traders but were nevertheless affected by cognitive interference. The memory task highlighted no significant differences between the groups. Therefore, this study found an advantage in traders’ attention when processing visual information in small sets with no retention. This result could influence trading activity—determining an immediate use of relevant visual information in decision making—and traders’ display layout organization.