Visual Search

What’s hiding in your reaction time data? New features of visual search behavior from hazard analysis

Sometimes, it seems like the most simple tasks are also the most frustrating. Take the junk drawer in your kitchen, for example. They’re in every home, we’re not proud of them, and whenever we spend several minutes looking for the vegetable peeler when cooking dinner, we promise ourselves that one day, we will get this […]

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Sensory information, goals, and prior knowledge come together to capture attention

Imagine that you’re in the center of a busy city watching a pedestrian traffic signal for your cue to walk. The green walking man gives the go-ahead and you start walking, a police car siren sounds and its emergency vehicle lighting flashes, capturing your attention, and sending you back to the sidewalk as the police […]

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Scan it like Beckham: Facilitating visual search by grouping objects into “teams”

Finding your office key amidst your building key, the lab key, your house key, the other house key in case you need to cat-sit for a friend is like finding a needle in a haystack. People who have tons of keys develop elaborate organizational systems, clumping together keys for similar places―like the Psychology building―which can […]

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Eye movements to nothing make good verbal memories

Have you ever had a conversation with someone who constantly averted their gaze? Why do you think that is? If you are like most people, you might suspect a myriad of reasons, with most being categorically not good. You might suspect that your conversational partner is socially uncomfortable, disinterested in the conversation, hiding something, or […]

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The sum of attention is more than its past: When memory and vision subtract

We have talked about pop-out before. The phenomenon is nearly self-explanatory: consider the two sets of dots in the figure below. There are 18 dots on the left and 150 on the right. In each array, there is a single red dot: what is your intuition about how long it would take to detect the […]

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Grandma, where’s Waldo? Comparing Goal-directed and Habit-based Attention in Older Adults

Visual search can be a very daunting task, whether it’s looking for keys among a pile of office supplies on a desk, or looking for a dime among a bunch of coins in your purse. It seems like no matter how many times you have checked and re-checked certain locations, the object of your affection […]

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Finding the Waldolance among sedans: Verbal cues can guide search for societally important vehicles

Finding an image among other images is a basic task—visual search—has been a staple of the vision scientist’s toolkit for decades. Even if one has no interest in visual search itself, the basic paradigm of searching for a target among an array of images is wonderfully useful for investigating memory, attention, and individual differences. In […]

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2 eyes, 4 targets, and 8 moving disks: Lagging gazes in object tracking

We keep track of multiple objects every day. When we drive, we need to keep track of the cyclist near the curb, the dump truck bearing down on us from behind, and the lost tourist in front of us who is signaling turns at random. When we are on the beach on a family outing, […]

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The hazard (functions) of detecting the pounce on the prey

How many things can we attend to simultaneously? Imagine being an air traffic controller and you are monitoring O’Hare arrivals on the day before Thanksgiving. How many aircraft can you attend to simultaneously? Or imagine watching a flock of grazing impalas in Krueger National Park or the Serengeti while a pride of lions is casually […]

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